Ms Josephine Feehily:

I thank the Chairman. Good morning everybody. I have a long presentation but the committee will be pleased to know that I do not intend to read it all. I want to give the committee more of a sense of the commission's approach and the reasoning behind the findings rather than necessarily reading them out literally.

The commission considered it very important to say that it is a good thing that older people are living longer and are living healthier, longer lives resulting in there being more older people. This is a good thing. Characterising this as a problem and a crisis is not language we like to use, nor is not something we want to contribute to. It is a challenge that has to be planned for and managed rather than having it characterised as a problem.

Intergenerational equity was one of the considerations in the commission's terms of reference. Characterising the fact that there are more older people as a problem gives rise to a real risk of breaking the intergenerational solidarity that we have, and we are very clear that that is not something we want to do.

With that in mind, beginning with the commission's approach, we had very narrow but focused and specific terms of reference. They were set within the programme for Government. When we looked at the programme for Government, we found that a number of elements there, which I will list, and members can read them at their leisure, were already settled Government policy and so we obviously had to take account of them. The other thing we found when we examined the programme for Government's direction, was that a number of other aspects of pensions had already been given to somebody else, for the want of a better word. For example, a universal income pilot had already been agreed and was located somewhere else and the Commission on Taxation and Welfare had already been agreed and was located somewhere else. Focused terms of reference and certain jobs that were already focused elsewhere were very much part of forming our approach to the work.

After we reviewed those and the terms of reference, we concluded that the most useful thing we could do was contribute to fixing the "system within the system", which was the language that we used to describe it. We set ourselves the task of identifying the scale of the sustainability challenge. In that context, we defined fiscal sustainability but also social sustainability as important. It was not just about money. We had a lot of contributions from experts. We had a consultation process where we had in excess of 200 submissions. Some 80% of them were from individuals. We had a survey which had more than 1,100 responses, so we had a lot of inputs to our work. We established a technical group chaired by my colleague, Roma Burke, to help us to establish with some certainty what all the inputs were telling us. I will hand over to her now because that group gave us an evidence base for the recommendations. I will come back in to outline the recommendations.