Mr. Michael Taft:

I do not have the numbers off the top of my head but SIPTU will research this in terms of manual and non-manual occupations and we will send that to the committee. The problem is that we cannot say X number would find it physically difficult beyond the age of 66 because it is a combination of the different types of work, even within the same in factory or the same firm, so it is difficult to nail down. However, the Deputy has raised a couple of points. We could say that manual workers might be the ones who are most at risk and it may well be that those are the occupations. However, let us take a hospitality worker, a cleaner aged 64, who is flipping eight mattresses a day. I struggle to flip our mattress once every six months whereas they do six to eight a day, yet we do not think of that cleaner as being someone in an arduous task. There is this idea that in the work of the future, we are all just going to be sitting, punching numbers into a computer or doing the same thing on our smartphones. We ignore the vast range of occupations which, in many cases, might be fit for a younger person but when people hit the age of 60, it becomes extremely difficult and they are at risk of injury. Then, when we put that in combination with the issue of healthy life expectancy, we have a much different perspective. I will let Mr. Berney develop that. We will attempt to nail those numbers down for the Deputy.