Ms Jacqueline Thornton:

I would ask the Senator not to volunteer Insurance Ireland for that, please. I mentioned earlier that there is a very robust and highly regulated pensions environment already in place. It is providing occupational schemes and is very experienced in doing that. It has learned over decades and the structure is already there. The original strawman proposal which saw the central processing authority as a processing centre that would collect contributions and give them out to the private pension providers seemed to work quite well because you would leverage the existing infrastructure; the auto-enrolment could be set up relatively quickly because you are not building a State body to deal with it and as I said, you are dealing with very experienced pension providers and are going back to a very highly-regulated environment. There are a lot of consumer protections there, solvency requirements and an onus on responsibility to the consumer that has already been built in. Looking at the UK or Australia, for example, those systems seem to work quite well. Nothing is perfect. Even the Nordic structures are not perfect. There are issues with all of them but I think that all stakeholders are agreed that auto-enrolment structures should be set up as quickly as possible, and we definitely want to see it delivered, so let us do that in the most cost-efficient and resource-efficient way possible.