Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

More than anything else, this is about fairness for people who have worked all their lives and are required to retire on reaching 65 years of age. Most of us here are former members of local authorities and we are all aware that local authority members are required to go on jobseeker's benefit for a year before they get their pension. As stated earlier, when the pension age is extended further the crisis will widen further. Women, in particular, are vulnerable to this situation. As stated by my colleagues, many women who worked for most of their lives and took a few years out from working to care for an elderly parent or their children now find themselves in the precarious position of their being entitled to only a very small pension or no pension. These issues need to be dealt with properly.

In an article in last Tuesday's The Guardian the famous physicist, Stephen Hawking, dealt with the issue of globalisation and automation of production, the Internet and the many new ways of producing wealth. It also dealt with how that wealth is moving into the hands of fewer people and how this is impacting on the masses in terms of the opportunities available to them to make a living throughout their lives and, in particular, to get a pension at the end of their working lives. These are serious issues that we need to deal with not only in Ireland but across Europe and the world. The issue of pensions comes to the fore in all this because now, when people reach the end of their working lives, they find that they are unable to live their lives in the manner to which they had become accustomed in the previous 40 or 50 years.

While this motion deals specifically with people who on reaching pension age are not entitled to a pension for another year and yet they are not permitted to work, the wider issue of pensions and what is going to happen in this area is a crisis with which we as a society need to deal with haste.

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