Willie Penrose (Longford-Westmeath, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Deputy Brady, Deputy O'Dea and I met representatives of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, ICTU, and it is concerned that the Government is guided by financial experts who made the rules as to how defined benefit schemes were to operate. Costly legislative changes were introduced to revalue deferred pensions, the cost of which has added to the burden of active members, and the regulator enforced these to the letter. The workers paid their contributions and paid for the regulation system but their pensions were not protected. The workers were not given any say in what was happening to their pension assets, neither were they given any choices as to what might be done when things went wrong. This has all contributed to the effective demise of defined benefit, DB, schemes. We must now tackle this and the lacuna in the law with comprehensive and appropriate legislation.

See this speech in context