Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Like Deputy Smith, I met Lillian and Jean. It immediately chimed with me because, just that week, another woman, Helen, came to my clinic and her story adds another layer of complexity, injustice and discrimination to the story that Deputy Smith has so articulately presented that faces a whole cohort of mostly women. It illustrates the point well. Ms McLennon reached retirement age recently, having worked continuously from the late 1970s or early 1980s all the way through to her retirement age. She made the full 30 or 35 years of contributions and so on. Upon retirement, she expected that she would get the full pension, but instead of receiving the €230 weekly pension, she is receiving €188.

I understand the reason for this is because she seems to have been hit on the treble in terms of a discrimination affecting this cohort of women of that age. She had worked part-time for only a few weeks, I think, in the late 1960s. She subsequently got married. Later, she was separated. At that time, if I understand this correctly, when a couple was married, only one person in the house could make PRSI contributions because the woman in the house was not seen as a full equal. Even though she was subsequently working, she was not making any PRSI contributions. During the period in which she was not working but was married, she was caught by the failure of the homemaker scheme to be retrospective for those years before 1994. She was caught by all of those things.

Her yearly average is brought down because she worked in the late 1960s. Also, some of the work she did is not counted on foot of the fact that she was not able to make contributions because, if I understand it correctly, only one member of a married couple's contributions counted, namely, those of her husband. Consequently, despite the fact that she has done as much work and made as many contributions as other people who get the full pension entitlement, she gets approximately €40 a week less. That is an unacceptable injustice and a discrimination against her on the basis that she is a woman of a particular age.

This is a major issue and an injustice. We are only beginning to see its impact as this cohort of women reach retirement age. Many more women will face this injustice in the coming years until that cohort works its way through to the 1986 threshold, when the homemaker's scheme kicks in and they will not be penalised. Whether it is by means of a combination of basing it on the total number of contributions someone makes, getting rid of the annual averaging, making the homemaker's scheme retrospective before 1986 and eliminating any possible discrimination in terms of women working prior to that date who were treated differently because they happened to be married or separated - I am not quite sure whether divorce was an option at the time - and whose work did not count because they were not liable to pay PRSI, whatever the Minister does, the discriminations to which I refer must be removed in order to ensure that there is equality for women like Helen and the many others who are likely to run foul of this inequity in the coming years.

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