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

I understand and am sympathetic to the case the Deputy is making. The homemaker's scheme was introduced by Fianna Fáil in 1994 and Fianna Fáil decided not to backdate it. The reason the Minister of the day, Michael Woods, decided not to backdate it was because of the very high cost of doing so. We estimate that the cost of doing so now would be approximately €290 million a year. When budget time comes around and one is Minister of Social Protection one must decide how best one is going to use additional resources and whether one targets them, as I sought to do, at those who need them the most, namely, the poorest in society, which is the reason I put the resources into jobseeker's benefit, the one-parent family payment, the widow's pension, the blind pension, the carer's allowance and disability allowance or whether one gives those resources instead to people who do not qualify for a means-tested payment at all, who are generally people who are a bit better off. That is the dilemma that faces any Minister at budget time. Of course one would like to do both but if one has to choose I hope one would tend to choose those means-tested payments paid to those who are the poorest in society.

The future is the new total contributions approach. I listened to the example the Deputy gave and it is anomalous to me that people who pay in more contributions get a lesser pension just because they paid them at the wrong time or over a longer period. We have worked out from our initial calculations that to do anything that is budget neutral, one would need to be making about 35 years of contributions to get a full pension. That is pretty normal. That is the case for people in employment and for public servants. However, in doing so, one could also give rise to many people ending up much worse off. Any change to the rules, as always, produces winners and losers unless one puts a lot of extra money into the system. What I intend to do is present a set of options on costings to the committee and consult it on how we go forward.

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