Paul Gavan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank all the witnesses. This is the best committee meeting I have attended all year and I am a member of a couple of committees. The quality of the contributions and the data we are getting are absolutely key. I want to address a couple of points that were raised.

Deputy Ó Cuív spoke about people in the real world, the arduous labour they do and whether their situation has been addressed by the commission. I do not know whether it has but I know Ms Ethel Buckley, who is a member of the commission, has spent years campaigning on the issue of the State pension age. She was instrumental in the STOP67 campaign, which had a huge impact at the most recent election. I have no doubt she would have raised this issue.

The real question I would ask is whether the other commission members were listening or how in touch they were in terms of real world people. Let us think about this for a second. There are 180,000 people working in the hospitality sector, including hotel housekeepers, cleaners and caterers. There are also healthcare assistants and home helps. Most of the people I have listed are women. Sometimes we think of arduous labour and assume it involves men in meat factories or construction, but a multitude of women workers have arduous jobs. To quote Michael Taft, are we really going to say to them after a lifetime of work that they have to continue working because they are not going to get their pension? I do not know about the Chair, but I was most struck by the data around healthy life expectancy, which is ten to 12 years. That brings it home. According to the Pensions Commission, we are perhaps likely to tell people that we are going to take two of the last ten or 12 years of healthy life because we will have to make them work longer.

At a committee meeting a couple of weeks ago, it was stated by the Department that we have to be realistic. My questions are for my colleagues in SIPTU. Workers have worked incredibly hard in physical jobs across all of the areas I have mentioned. I have not even mentioned the front-line heroes and people who have kept the economy going over the past two years, including those working in food production, warehouses and meat factories. Are we really going to say to them that they are going to lose two years? How realistic is it to expect people to do that work for another two years? Is it more realistic to consider a different combination of changes to ensure our pension system meets the people who need it?