Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Just looking at that, this longitudinal research probably has not been done. As I said earlier, if we are saying that people are in college until the age of 23, we will expect a decent proportion of them to enter higher-paid work, probably into an occupational pension, or to an income point where they will say that the 40% tax relief is going to be a lot more advantageous to them than auto-enrolment. If we consider the 100,000 people identified as being under the age of 23 who are not in full-time education, I suspect that if we had research done on this it would show that those people will end up benefiting from an auto-enrolment scheme in the longer term. I reiterate that one of the concerns of the committee is that people might end up in physically demanding work and it may be unreasonable to ask them to work to the age of 67 or whatever age we set the retirement age at. I am slightly worried that 23 is not an age anywhere that is internationally high. I wonder if we should we look at the logic of that again. I do not have the research to back this up. Does the Department have that? I suspect that the cohort of 100,000 identified as not being in full-time education are the very people who would benefit in the longer term. Mr. Duggan mentioned 600,000 as the figure we hope to be in the auto-enrolment sphere. The 100,000 cohort would be one sixth of that figure, given the demographics, so I wonder about the age limit of 23. Are we missing out on the exact cohort who would be most likely to benefit from an auto-enrolment in the long term? Should we rethink this age limit in that regard?