Mr. Conor King:

We have campaign in place with our colleagues in An Garda Síochána, PDFORRA, the fire brigade through SIPTU and the prison officers. They have all recognised the clear and present danger to retention among uniformed services in this country that a single pension scheme provides. We were alone in beating the drum on this. We had engagement peripherally with the Department of public expenditure on this. The mantra came back that the single pension scheme was brought in to save money for the Exchequer and to increase sustainability of pensions. We accept all of that, but uniformed services are different for a number of reasons. First, the mandatory retirement age is less than the rest of public service sector. They cannot serve to 70 years of age like other post-2013 pensioners. Second, the nature of service for uniformed services is more robust. There is more night work. There is more shift work. It is more debilitating going into the future. Therefore, the requirement to retire early exists to a far greater extent in those aspects of the public service than in other aspects with the greatest of respect to all other public servants. That is why a pension was brought in and the facilitation for an occupational supplementary pension was brought in after 1995. However, it was done away with unilaterally in 2012.

Everybody who has come in since then is not only on, as Lieutenant Colonel Ryan said, career average earnings, which means the longer they are held at a lower grade the worse it is for their pension, but when they come to a certain age when they could have children, dependents or a mortgage and other ancillary costs based on their demographic, they will not be able to afford to stay. What they are going to do, and we are informed they are doing is making the decision to leave earlier than they need. The Chief of Staff of the Defence Forces has noted this as a catalyst for premature departures. He has been strong in front of this committee and at our conference in advocating for reform of the post-2013 single pension scheme for uniformed services.