Regina Doherty (Meath East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for raising this as I am pleased to be able to outline a timeline. The first tranche of people who will receive an increase and a pension payment backdated to last March will start receiving them next week. Of the 79,000 people involved there was a cohort where we knew why they had gaps in their service or career contribution history and we were able to fill those gaps with other information from the children's records we had. Those people will get their payments from next week. The regulations were signed this week. There is a cohort of people who have gaps on which we do not have information and we have invited them by letter to apply either online or through the paper application to fill in those gaps. That will enable us to increase their pension payments where possible. That exercise is ongoing and I hope to be able to finalise it by the end of the first quarter, which was the scheduled timeline.

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