Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

We have brought forward proposals on foot of the Pensions Commission's recommendations. I announced last September that I had brought a memorandum to Cabinet. As we know, the State pension age will remain at 66. Flexible access to the contributory State pension will be introduced from 1 January to allow people reaching 66 years of age to defer access and allow them to continue to contribute in order to make up the difference, if they wish to do so, up to the age of 70. As a consequence of allowing people to defer access to their pension until 70, we have a bit of work to do to extend access to contingency-based short-term payments. We are looking at how best we can do it.

The long-term sustainability of the State pension will be addressed by increasing over time the social insurance contribution. These rates will be reviewed in a structured way and based on up-to-date data at scheduled intervals. In the first quarter of this year I will be looking at that. I will be getting a report on this to see what we need to do in that space.

The smoothed earnings calculation would also apply to benchmarking or the indexed rate of State pension payments. That will be introduced as an input to the annual budget process and will be submitted to Government every year.

The Deputy asked about retirement age. We have a few things to look at on that and we will make further proposals on how we deal with that. We are working our way through it at the moment.