Professor Alan Barrett:

It would be a specific pension fund. I have argued about and discussed this for quite a long time. We have a State-run mandatory pension system in Ireland - namely, PRSI and the social welfare pension. The argument that many people have made is that we need to develop that basic system into an earnings-related system where one would have mandatory contributions into a fund. It is very hard to introduce these thing straight off because it is perceived as another tax and we know there is resistance to that. When one has something like the USC, does it provide an opportunity over the next five years to politically engineer a situation whereby one could turn that into an earnings-related pensions contribution and develop a public pension system to overcome the difficulties that most people here recognise? Here is the catch. If it was a mandatory system, there would be no logic for having a tax incentive attached to it, because why would one incentivise people to do things they have to do? I know that is a very specific answer to the Deputy's broader point.