Peter Mathews (Dublin South, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for attending. Everything is interrelated on the Government books. There are off-balance sheet items in the water debate that is expressing itself on the streets outside and now there are 15,000 former employees of a semi-State airline and related businesses who would not have had a problem if they had been full State employees because they would have had a State pension, which is paid from the Central Fund. However, there was a separate pension fund outside the pure State arrangements. When interest rates fall, it benefits the Government and central funding of the country but it is to the disadvantage of pensioners, whether they are existing or deferred pensioners or current employees. This is because one would require more funding to pay the same income level of pensions when interest rates fall. That is the reason the pension deficit went from €344 million in 2011 to €769 million in March 2013, as indicated by the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Deputy Donohoe. Equities, if they are in the pension fund, will have grown rather than collapsed in that time but the near-cash equivalents - or bonds - have fallen. More of this would hence be required to have a flow in order to pay pensions.

Within this interrelated picture, the Government boasts daily to people in newspapers that the cost of the national debt is falling, thanks to the efforts of the public that is being squeezed, hurt, crunched and steamrolled. That is why more than 80,000 people are on Merrion Square and the other side of the campus. We must be fair and the Minister cannot have her cake and eat it. It is wrong that we are getting e-mails such as that described by Deputies Creighton and Ryan. After 40 years of reasonable expectation and staff cost rationalisation within that time, it is wrong that these people are beaten up and told that the pensions are only worth half or even 25% of what they could reasonably have expected. There is something going very wrong amid the smoke and mirrors of the accounting.

The Minister is an accountant and will understand these questions. Is there a deferred member trustee or a fully retired member trustee? Are there a few of them? Is there a current employee among the trustees? These actuarial experts push things around like trolleys on wheels and then send out fee notes plus VAT at 23% in any event. We need skin in the game, as they say, and that will be when we can get good trustee management and people who understand the issue. It is not rocket science and one day of coaching would teach anybody how to be a trustee. If there is difficulty in understanding, I will do the work pro bono. There is too much jargon and too many multi-syllable words. There are too many lever-arch or ordinary files with too much fudge. It is clearly wrong that 15,000 people are being messed around as they are. The Government must come clean, be fully transparent and spell out exactly what are the intentions. Even if there is a bit of a deficit that is objectively extraneous to the understanding and capabilities of people inside the black box, one might say there is a shortfall of 10% or 15%; that can be shared fairly, with a simple explanation of what is happening.

There are people going around with metaphorical bits of string, Sellotape, blindfolds, smoke and mirrors in labyrinthine corridors. That does not do it for me. One could put the plight of these 15,000 people on a wall and show the age profiles by decile, along with who contributed the different amounts. We should remember that there were employee contributions and they did not all come from employers. There was rationalisation and people were told that there had to be improvements in operating results, profit-and-loss accounts and balance sheets. When elements are moved off balance sheet, what were employees are changed to deferred pensioners. That goes off the balance sheet and profit-and-loss accounts into the trustee balance sheet and actuarial funding equations.

It is smoke and mirrors. It is a practice we must put a stop to. We can start doing so by taking the iron-clad brake of the whip system from the Government parties. It already has a majority, so does it not trust itself to be able to debate the pros and cons of aspects of legislation needed for the circumstances in which the country finds itself?

Unemployment is down by 100,000 and jobs are up by 81,000 but what about the 500,000 who have emigrated? Somebody said to me last Friday that the rate of unemployment is falling but I said my second son is not in that statistic. We just saw him off earlier this morning for two years. That is the second one. The atmosphere here is not even good for people of that age. They are asked to fill out an income tax form 11, which is 23 pages. God almighty. It is a simple thing. Where is the simplicity? Even with property tax and water charges, a new bureaucracy is born. People have to pay them out of their incomes, so if we got a good fix on the incomes-----

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