Mr. Niall Egan:

Last September, the Government gave a commitment that this year the Department of Social Protection would produce a report calculating figures using smoothed earnings, which is a buying power equivalent, showing what social welfare rates for State pensions would have to be indexed by in order to match a smoothed earnings approach. That will be submitted to the Government in September and will be an input into the budgetary process. We are going to start the process this year.