Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the motion and recognise the work of Deputy John Brady in bringing it before the House. I will certainly support it. The State pension system is clearly broken and lacks transparency. Departmental officials are now not allowed to tell people coming up to pension age what pension they are likely to get from the State. It also lacks fairness as some people might work for ten years and pay a fraction of the contributions others pay but get full payments, over and above those who have contributed a lot more but in a less linear fashion.

As has been said repeatedly tonight, it is also deeply discriminatory towards women. We know that, on average, women get 40% less in retirement than men. Why is this? There are lots of reasons, among them the fact that the current system does not properly account for periodic work, it does not account for the many years spent raising children and it does not properly account for people who are self-employed. I had a case last week of a woman who worked for three months after college. She stopped working, raised kids for many years, went back to work and worked up to retirement but is being hammered for the years when she was raising her children. In a committee meeting last week, the National Women's Council identified pensions as the single biggest issue they are contacted about. This is not only important; it is also mainstream and is not in any way a marginal issue.

We need to create a system which is designed not for PAYE men but for everybody, including the self-employed, parents and women. We need targeted measures for those women who find themselves penalised by the system right now. We need to transition immediately to an open, transparent system where people can see what they are going to be entitled to, can contribute more and are not penalised for doing many of the things one has to do in life other than pay PRSI stamps every week.

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