Mr. Seamus Coffey:

Decisions like that are political in nature. We do not have a benchmark or indexing system in Ireland whereby we would get the number for, say, average weekly wages and benchmark or index weekly social welfare payments such as the State pension against it. This gives potential for the pension rate to change the share of weekly earnings. I am not quite sure of the numbers but a change from 32% to 30% can happen because we do not have a formal system. It is very much down to the decisions taken by the Government and Oireachtas in the annual budgets. While there might be arguments in favour of benchmarking or indexing the payments in the current environment, it is not something that is in place in Ireland at the moment.