Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

It will not be headline news, but she is a smart, competent person.

I assure the committee that we will have direct conversations and we will keep the veterans’ bodies very much up to speed on what we are trying to do. The easy thing for us to do here would have just been to say that we cannot pay the pension top-ups until the end of January or early February. However, we tried not to do that and instead pay as much as we possibly can before the end of the year. People want money before Christmas, and we get that. However, this is a complex enough ask of our team in terms of pensions. We are doing one element of it, which involves most of the money. We will then top up and make adjustments, if there are any to be made, for individual pensions early in the new year in order that we can get as much money out as possible. Some of the €7 million relating to those pension increases will not be spent. We will have to give that money back to the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. However, we will try to spend as much of it as we can in order to get it to people. We have taken the full amount because that is the understanding with the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. We will spend as much of it as we can. We will then top up to make sure that nobody loses out early in the new year.