Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

While we are on the subject, there is obviously a big controversy in the area of public sector pensions at the moment. I presume that some of the members of Age Action are public sector pensioners. What is Mr. Moran's opinion on the moves being mooted, as I and many workers and unions see it, and on the talk of further eroding public service pensions? There is talk of increases being linked only to inflation rather than to half of career-end earnings or the average earnings, which was the first phase of attacking those pensioners. Has Mr. Moran any thoughts on that subject?

It may be a controversial area to get into from Mr. Moran's point of view but there is a school of thought around improving the pensions for low and middle-income pensioners and for ordinary pensioners on the State pension, which is to do something about the huge tax breaks for the very wealthy on their private pension contributions. They get very nice pensions at the end of it and a huge proportion of the tax breaks available for this area actually go to that cohort. If we began to look at that measure then we could use the money to increase the level of the State pension. Does Mr. Moran have views on that debate?

I will move on to my last question. I know that Mr. Moran spoke of home-care packages and the increasing demographic pressure to provide for our growing, older population. Mr. Moran said he would rather start with a vision on what it is we want for people and then afterwards talk about how we would pay for it. I believe this is the right starting point but we on the Committee on Budgetary Oversight must consider how to pay for it. I agree that we must start with the vision but we also need to think about how to pay. The unions have been pushing, quite rightly, on the whole issue of employers' PRSI and the very low levels of employers' PRSI being paid in the State compared to the rest of the European Union. I believe it is fairly indisputable and is just a fact. Calculations have been done that show if Ireland moved anywhere close to the average EU PRSI contributions, a huge pot of money would accrue from that. It would actually begin to generate the sorts of revenues we need to deal with the problems and needs of an ageing population. Perhaps Mr. Moran would comment on some of those suggestions.