Mr. Frank Moran:

The critical starting point is that after the 2015 equality referendum, the Government asked all Departments to carry out an audit to make sure they were all in compliance. The responsibility for pensions appears to have been vested in the Department of Social Protection. It affected a change to the Pensions Act 1990, which was the governing Act in respect of equality for men and women in occupational pension schemes. It was the appropriate area in which to insert an expansion of the understanding of occupational pensions.

For some reason, however, of which nobody has ever been able to make logic, and dare I say it, the Department's response to my petition does not deal with it in any adequate way, it inserted conditionality on both the civil partnership Act 2010, which came into operation on 1 January 2011. If we add the 36 months to the starting date, we end up with January 2014, in the context of an Act that was introduced after the referendum that nobody in 2010 would have known was ever going to happen. It introduced that, and the further anomaly related to the 36-month period for the operation of the Act applying to same-sex couples who married after 2015. For them, that 36-month period went up to 2018, so that was another implicit anomaly.

The Department has expressed a belief that this was something to do with transition. How can we say the law is being applied with openness and transparency if we create a conditionality that applies to the law in 2018 and is backdated to 2010? The only way this can be dealt with sufficiently is by simply removing that one sentence in the Act that lays down the 36 months. If that were removed, there would be equality of application of the law.