Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

It is very hard to put a finite number on it but even if there was a fairly broad list, all we need to do is establish that this is a non-runner in practical terms. That is my view. I think that going to 68 is not dealing with the realities for people in my constituency. We need a lot of examples of why and how this is not real-world stuff. As I said, we have to take into account that we are talking about the work period from the late 1980s onwards, perhaps 1988 if we take 40 years as being the number of contributions people have, so there is no point talking about work practices of the future or even of the 2020s. It is from 1988 onwards and we know what the work was like out there. It is just to give us more of a flavour because it baffles me, personally, how anybody could suggest this if they had day-to-day experience of dealing with people who are working in these types of professions. It is something that worries me about this report in that it just seems to miss so many of the people I meet every day and the condition they are in, and I am just talking about people who come in to me off the street with all sorts of problems, not all of them pension-related, and the physical shape they are in.