Ms Camille Loftus:

I wish to mention very briefly in that context the pension gap between women and men, to which Ms Allen alluded in the statistics she gave. It is one thing to make a choice to stay at home rather than engage in a career, but it is another to find oneself paying for that choice again at pension time. It is a double penalty. One thing that is being considered is meshing together or integrating the USC and PRSI systems. That presents an opportunity within the broader social insurance system, in which care work has been seen as an exception that is tagged on rather than as something built that is into it from the very beginning. It would be an opportunity, particularly for people of the Deputy's wife's generation, for whom full-time work in the home was a much more prominent experience, but these women do pay for it at pension time.