Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank Professor Kinsella for that clarification. So the fund is earmarked for ageing. In his opening statement, Professor Kinsella said the cost of ageing can be identified as pensions but pensions constitute just a portion albeit the larger component but it is not the majority component. Health, long-term care and education are also factors and the cost of those three areas combined will be larger than the cost of pensions over the next 20 to 30 years. Professor Kinsella talks about known knowns and unknowns. Given the fact that we know this cost is coming and bearing down on us, would it not be more appropriate to plan for that now in terms of tax revenue to make sure the additional costs of education, health and pensions are dealt with through whatever changes we need to make to PRSI or income tax or decisions regarding expenditure as opposed to a sovereign wealth fund dealing with issues that may not be known at this point such as a pandemic in the future or a major issue relating to migration that would cost billions of euro? We have spent €3 billion on Ukrainians who are fleeing persecution.

The issues regarding climate change are immediate and I do not think we can put some of that off for ten years because we do not have the money at this point or we have an expenditure rule that limits us to 5% so we cannot build the type of infrastructure we need to make us energy-sufficient and we cannot develop our ports. There is so much infrastructure that needs to be developed. I would like to tease that out. We know some of the costs will arise in 20 or 30 years, although some of that may change. Demographics have changed dramatically over the past two years. A colleague of mine and I were talking about the elections and the way boundaries will be cut off in the census.

The population of County Donegal has grown by 5,000. It has been great to have new arrivals there in the past two years. I want to focus on the question of whether, given what we know, we should be planning for that differently.