Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 13 July 2022

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach

Summer Economic Statement: Irish Fiscal Advisory Council

Mr. Sebastian Barnes:

We produced a long-term sustainability report that we published in July 2020. It involved a full modelling exercise, and it modelled trends in participation. Those participation rates were already quite high. If we were to go back to the 1960s, or to a period like that, then there would have been areas of low participation that may have been caught up. There is also a role for migration. The number of workers is going to increase because net migration is expected to increase. I do not know if any of my colleagues can remember the details of the assumptions we made in this regard. We also assumed, however, that older people will participate more. As a result, those effects are built in. This will help us because it will mean there will be more workers in future for these reasons, but that will not offset the fact that many more people will be retiring than was the case before.