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

The Department and the Government were involved in this process, but the Oireachtas was not. We do not have to buy in. We can write any report we like. We can go back and say the original model put forward by ICTU was correct, whereby it would be State controlled. The CPA is all fine and good, but all the people from outside on it, advising the Government and so on, will be from the industry, and the pension industry does not have a great record. I was there when it all started unravelling, with all the promises made relating to defined benefits and all the rest. Suddenly, it was gone with the wind. This committee could write back and say we have examined the legislation, that we think it is fundamentally flawed and that it should be a State model.

We can write any report we like. We are not hidebound to the Government. We are the Oireachtas. I am a member of a Government party but I do not feel hidebound by the Government when I sit on the committee. ICTU should not feel itself confined to what the Government has decided. We are not as confined as the witnesses probably think we are. We want to look at this fundamentally because we want to test every theory. As I said, if we look over the long term of the past 50 years at matters people have thought they could legislate into certainty, with all these bodies, we will find they take on a life of their own and say that for this, that or the other reason they cannot control one thing or another, whereas if the State controls it, at least it can keep changing the thing as it goes along. It is only with the will of the Oireachtas that this can happen, however, whereas independent bodies can go all over the place.