Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

Obviously, people signed up to this scheme with the expectation they were going to be covered when they retired, and the fact this is a public body would have given them an additional assurance. We are talking about the case of CIÉ but I have engaged also with people from the likes of the ESB, which is a semi-State company. Issues such as inflation and, in this case, potentially full or partial privatisation have a bearing on the income of the pension fund but some of these pension funds have changed in nature. It is interesting that legitimate expectation is used for certain classes of people, including us politicians, but legitimate expectation tends not to be used as a defence in the case of workers in the likes of semi-State companies. It would be useful to get a response.