Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Taoiseach. As he knows, the Joint Committee on Social Protection, Community and Rural Development and the Islands produced a report earlier this year on the Pensions Commission recommendations. One of the key issues for the committee in overcoming our pensions challenge over the next 50 years is the introduction of legislation banning mandatory retirement in employment contracts - both new contracts, as well as being retrospectively applied to current work contracts - giving people the option, if they wish, to work beyond their present retirement age. It is the view of the committee members that it would be wrong to force people to retire at 65 and then have to wait until 68 to access a pension.

The committee considered a technical paper produced by the Pensions Commission which pointed out that while increasing the State pension age has the greatest impact on reducing pension expenditure, a substantial increase in the employment rate of older workers would also reduce future expenditure. This paper points out that the difference between increasing the pension age to 68 compared to increasing the employment rate of older workers by ten percentage points over the next 50 years is just 0.3% of GNI*. This shortfall has already been made up thanks to the higher participation rates in our workforce revealed by the CSO earlier this year. Surely, if as much effort was put into removing barriers to facilitate older people working longer as there has been in pushing up the retirement age, we believe it would be within our capacity as a country to increase the number of older people working by an average of one fifth of a percentage point a year.

If we remove the forced requirement to retire at 65, many workers will continue to remain in employment. This is not just because of the changing nature of work, particularly here in Ireland, where we are moving from more manual employment to technology-based or even remote-based employment, which allows people to continue to physically work for far longer, but also because some of the financial realities of living in Ireland today mean people will have to work longer to be financially secure in their retirement.

There is an argument that if we allow people to work beyond their 65th birthday, we are closing off promotion opportunities for younger staff in an organisation. However, the Civil Service has overcome this challenge for senior positions by filling such posts on a seven-year basis, thus allowing new thinking and younger people to compete for such roles. There is no reason that, for a change, the private sector cannot take a leaf out of the public sector book.

My questions are as follows. First, when will the Government make a decision on the pension age eligibility? Second, will the Government introduce legislation banning the retirement age in employment contracts?