Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 1 October 2025

Joint Committee on Social Protection, Rural and Community Development

Special Reports and Reviews on Social Protection and Rural Development Issues: European Court of Auditors

2:00 am

Mr. Tony Murphy:

This is the first one we did on pensions as such. What we can see in the charts is how advanced some member states are compared with others, such as the Netherlands and Denmark. They are heavily involved in all of this and the money that has been invested for different pensions funds. It is a start. It is not going to solve everything overnight. It is at least a positive step. As we talked about the demographics and people living longer, now the ratio of people is going to be going down from five working people to almost going to be two to one, there is the financing of that. The national pensions committee figures for the accrued liability for the public service pension scheme are astronomical. If we look at the EU, the figure is almost €100 billion for liability for pensions of officials. We saw a stark thing when the UK left the EU, they had to pay their portion of that. At the time, it was approximately €14 billion or something like that. They are huge figures. It is an issue that is a concern for all of us, it is to be hoped, at some point in time.

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