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

One of the problems that the commission faced was that the interface between auto-enrolment and the age that some could access the pension were not interlinked. I would look at this simplistically enough. The State has only a finite amount of money. I am one of those people who actually believes that it is finite. In the longer term, the Government can only spend what it brings in.

It seems that something that has not been taken into account is that, on one hand, the Minister is saying that people, many of whom will not be fit to work after the age of 66, will come to the age and hit a wall because they will only be in receipt of the working age payment up to age 68, while on the other, the State will be able to fund in the same year money into an auto-enrolment system which, by its nature, will benefit those with a higher income more than those with a lower income, straight out of the Exchequer, as the Minister just said.

If she gave me a choice of what to do with the money, the first thing I would do is pay the people aged between 66 and 68 and put a caveat on that. Then if there was money still in the pot, which has had a finite amount paid into it, it should be put into auto-enrolment.

There is one caveat, but the commission disregarded it completely. There was the principle of the transition pension. Perhaps there is an argument for saying that if a person comes to the age of 66 and still earns a lot of money and continues to work after their 66th birthday, he or she could not claim the contributory pension, as he or she could not with the transition pension long ago. If a person is earning a few hundred euro per week, let him or her off. However, if a person is on €50,000, €60,000, €70,000, €80,000, €100,000 or €200,000, he or she could not claim and I would have no problem with that. However, funny enough, the commission totally banged that one on the head. If the Minister came back with a hybrid, I would say that is fair enough. However, many people will not be able to work after 66 because of mental health issues, burnout issues or physical issues.

These debates are not detached from each other. As the Minister always reminds us, there is a finite amount of money, and choices have to be made. We seem to be saying that we giveth 20 years hence with one hand but we taketh with the other hand, and I just do not get it. That is just my view and I wanted to put that view on the record of the House because there has been some rather ill-informed commentary in some of the media where people have not read what the committee did or why it did it. We were able to take a wider lens than the commission. The commission's terms of reference were totally constrained and I accept that it was not within its remit to take some of these issues into account. However, it is within the remit of Government and the Oireachtas.