Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

In the first instance, I reiterate what I said to the previous witnesses that the Department is to be praised for turning this legislation around so quickly after the Supreme Court judgment that gave rise to it. That judgment clearly created a need for us to respond in a legislative fashion and the Department has done so very quickly.

I will make a number of points, some of which are in response to the evidence we heard from FLAC earlier.

I will quote from the summary of evidence given to the committee by FLAC, which states:

At present, people who are separated or divorced from a spouse or civil partner may access a survivor’s pension if that spouse or civil partner dies, provided that he or she, the surviving partner, has not remarried and is not cohabiting with someone else. The general scheme would remove this entitlement and people currently claiming on this basis would lose their payment after the enactment of the amending legislation. In FLAC's view, there is no clear rationale for this change and indeed, it may run contrary to the principles underpinning the O’Meara decision.

I understand that the principles of the O'Meara decision related to the children who were involved but I stand to be corrected. The worry is that we will land at a point where we have differential treatment of families based on whether they are separated, divorced, married, in civil partnership or cohabiting. If that concern has been legitimately raised by FLAC, we may find ourselves before the courts again, which is not where we want to be.

The second point I want to raise relates to the effective date for eligibility. I understand how the date of the judgment would be arrived at as the starting point but the judgment itself is retrospective and stated that the person had to be paid. Am I correct? The Supreme Court gave a judgment that the pension was to be back paid. I wonder if we can stand over the commencement date and use the date of the judgment as the earliest in the case of a death that occurred prior to that date. Those are the two main issues I want to put. Are we creating a differential in the treatment of families? Can we stand over that commencement date?