Mr. Ciarán Lawler:

The first caveat is that if we are looking at an earnings benchmark and looking back at either 2021 or 2020 to calculate that, earnings were skewed in both years because low-income workers were disproportionately affected by the pandemic and lost their jobs. Therefore it resulted in an unusual increase in earnings. If you were to use the earnings figure at the time, there would have been an increase of about €10.50 in the State pension which would have cost about €132 million extra on top of the budget change of €5 that was made.