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

I have reservations about all this, especially at the lower income end. None of us can really quantify, but things we cannot quantify still exist. Futures that cannot be quantified still exist. Much of what is quantified is wrongly quantified. We had a classic case of this. The Minister for Social Protection appeared before the committee last week. She admitted that the 2017 PRSI projections on deficits were way off the mark and were in surplus rather than deficit. Even five-year projections are more fiction than fact.

This goes to the nub of where we put our people's money. The great thing about the pay-as-you-go system for the State pension is that it is a levelling-up pension. In other words, people on high incomes pay in much more money than those on low incomes but everybody gets the same State pension, if they have made enough contributions. In other words, the system only counts the number of contributions and there is no relativity to what is paid in. That is a great leveller-up in this society. This relates to the point made by our Chairperson, namely, do politicians concentrate particularly on the people on low incomes, and on putting their effort, money and the State's money into assisting those people? It should be remembered, whether it is through tax relief or the 25% top-up, that the State is a significant contributor to pensions. Is it better doing it that way or putting it into the pay-as-you-go system? The pay-as-you-go system is the ultimate one. For example, women working part-time and earning €38 a week get their full contribution, as does the person earning €200,000 a year and paying PRSI, and the whole way up. They all get the exact same pension. The challenge is, in making sure everyone has got this pension, are we actually tempting future politicians to state that since everyone has this private pension - which they will not have - they can then dispense with being very generous and make the basic State pension much less? That is not something the witnesses can quantify, but it is something that we can bring our political heads to.

As I said, the pay-as-you-go system is the greatest leveller of the gender pay gap. I often think about the gender pay gap. In some situations, it is largely irrelevant for those in couples because they work on the basis of what is yours is mine and what is mine is yours. Whether the man or woman has a higher income is irrelevant because contributions go into a common pot. In other cases, it is a massive, practical, day-to-day issue. It is very hard for us to find out which in any individual case. I am not sure whether any state ever had women earning, on average over the course of their careers, the same average - I am talking about averages - as men. If not, we need other mechanisms to level off the gap, especially when securing old age. That is where the State pension comes in. We undoubtedly have a huge challenge. The choices of individuals, couples and families, and all sorts of things come into play here, as we know as politicians who sit with real people who make real decisions.

I will go off on a totally different tack for a minute. I raised this issue previously. We are a very small, open economy. It was mentioned that €21 billion would be in this fund. From the experience of the insurance industry, how much of that would be invested in this economy? How much, on average, of all that money put in by people in this economy, including the State, which would be a quarter shareholder in that fund with €5 billion, do insurance funds, pension funds and so on in this country invest in foreign bonds, foreign equities and so on? How much would be retained in the economy?