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

I do not have a principled problem with there being a universal tier one pension paid to everyone in the way child benefit is, with a tier two pension - a top-up, if one likes - based totally on contributions made by a worker. Were one to design a pension system from scratch, one might very well do that and it would be a very good approach. As I mentioned, the difficulty is we estimate it would cost €1 billion to do this or, if we did it on a cost-neutral basis, we would have to reduce existing State pensions by 14%, which is not viable.

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