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

I understand that point of view but I am not sure that I agree with it. We know that a lot of people who will find themselves in auto-enrolment will find themselves very passively in auto-enrolment. I do not know if I envisage a huge preponderance of those customers sitting down and sorting through different types of pension offerings. Even when I try to renew my own health insurance, for example, I find myself bamboozled so I do not know if an auto-enrolment customer is necessarily going to sit down and take that sort of proactive stance. I think that if they were doing that, they would probably invest in a private pension directly as opposed to this. As that is a perspective that probably is different from mine, it will educate my perspective and is useful in that way.

On the impact on women, the National Women's Council of Ireland has similar concerns. When I dug down into this aspect I realised that a lot of what Mr. Bolger talked about concerned two issues as the people who earn under €20,000 are not automatically enrolled. I note they have the option to opt in, so I wonder about automatically enrolling people who earn that low an income and this is one of the issues that have come through concerning the general scheme. Mr. Bolger might talk to me on this point because we know that the preponderance of people who earn less than €20,000 are women. I encountered a statistic suggest it is 75% .

Another interesting aspect concerns the breaks in payments. If somebody avails of parental leave, for example, then that is a break in his or her payments which will, in turn, impact on that person's ability to amass a significant pension pot. If we are looking at a system where one has that 6:6:2 model of payments being paid in, how do we envision the scheme being able to cope? How does a woman taking maternity leave affect the 6:6:2 model? Are we still asking the person involved to make the 6% contribution, which is matched by 6% still from the employer, who presumably, though not in all cases, is paying out maternity leave at that time and there is also 2% provided by the State? Irish Life has identified a problem as opposed to saying it has come here with a solution but maybe this is something Mr. Bolger would tease out this matter.