Ms Lucy O'Donoghue:

I acknowledge that. While I have not gone through it, the people who worked on this legislation did not pick the 36-month period from nowhere. To be fair, they generally have a good mark. I presume they are concerned about precedent.

The other issue, which I do not think Mr. Moran referred to, relates to the Deputy’s question about the pension scheme pre-1995 and post-1995. It is not so much about the post-1995 pension. An option was given to people who were in the original scheme at a point. It was probably at a different time in the Central Bank than it was in the wider Civil Service. Those people were given an option to move to a scheme that would cover them for marriage, partnership or whatever post retirement. People in Mr. Moran’s situation were never going to benefit, however. It did not matter whether he did not benefit before or after retirement. There will be people in the Civil Service and Central Bank schemes who may not have opted for the new scheme to cover them after retirement because they felt they were never going to benefit anyway as they were never going to be married. That was it. It is an issue that goes further back in some respects. While it does not mean more people are affected, it means that removing one brick does not remove the brick for someone else. People would need to be given an option again and asked whether they would have made a different choice if the social scene had been different in 1984 when they took that option or if they had known equality legislation would be implemented. It is a complex and difficult issue.