Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Deputy has spoken about three aspects of the issue. There is a minimum number of contributions people have to have made to receive a contributory pension. This means that during the entire course of their working lives they must have worked for ten years, or 520 weeks. Out of the entire course of a normal working life of perhaps 40 to 45 years, someone must have worked at least ten years and there are no proposals to change this requirement. The second issue is that of averaging, which is a different aspect, on which I take the Deputy's point. We are trying to develop a solution which is moving away from when people made their contributions to the total number they made throughout their working lives. The third issue is that people were forced to leave the workforce. We must bear in mind that most of the people in question, in fact, almost all of them, were public servants pre-1995 who never made contributions, or made reduced contributions which did not entitle them to a State contributory pension. Even if they had not been forced to leave work and never got married - even if they were men - they would not now be entitled to a State contributory pension because public servants pre-1995 paid stamp at a different rate which did not give them any entitlement to receive the State contributory pension. That is still the case.

See this speech in context