Dr. Laura Bambrick:

I will start with the last question on international best practice. The reason we are comparing the UK, New Zealand and Australia is because when the State pension was first introduced in 1908 - do not worry, I will not give the committee 100 years of history - all four countries were part of the UK so we have the same pension model. We all have a flat State pension. Other European continental countries have a pay related State pension, so it is important for Ireland, New Zealand, Australia and the UK to have that second layer of pension. The role of the State pension is only to keep people out of poverty. The role of auto-enrolment or workplace pensions is to maintain people's pre-retirement living standards. That is the reason we are looking closely at those three countries. They are similar or near duplicates of the Irish system. They have the three pillars of the State, occupational and private pensions. Auto-enrolment will sit onto that. While it is possible to look at other countries, they are best practice for Ireland to consider because there are too many differences in the other ones.

As the Senator will be aware, bogus self-employment is a long-standing issue in the trade union movement. We have always argued that one of the key drivers or incentives for bogus self-employment from an employer's perspective is the 11.5% employers' pay related social insurance contribution. Over the next ten years, we are looking to increase that by a minimum of 6% with this auto-enrolment. That would bring it close to 18% without any other increases happening. Therefore we are massively increasing the incentive towards bogus self-employment.

On top of that, we have to be concerned about the lack of pension coverage among the self-employed. As for the workaround we see, this is just taking from the Department's own deep dive into how it would address bogus self-employment and one way it said this was separate to auto-enrolment is that, where there is a self-employed person with no employees providing all of their services to one employer, that employer would be liable for their PRSI. The same practice should apply for social insurance. When an employer is paying a contractor or, as we would say, a bogusly self-employed person, they would have an obligation to pay it as part of that. That would get rid of that incentive and the unintended consequences, which are a real concern for the roll-out of this scheme. My colleague Mr. Berney will speak about the matter of death in service.