Mr. Tim Duggan:

The thing to remember is it is a contributory system that works on the basis that people make contributions of money into the system to sustain it. The Irish contributory system is very generous in terms of the credits and home-caring periods that it provides compared with other countries in the EU.

If credits and home-caring periods are to be introduced to a contributory system, it means we either accepts that people can access a full contributory pension with little or no payments or we put limits on that and the Government has decided, following a recommendation by the Pensions Commission, that the limit on home-caring periods should be 50% of the time that is required to build that contributory record.