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

I acknowledge that the Deputy has acknowledged that there is now a budget surplus and that the Social Insurance Fund is back in surplus. In fact, it has been in surplus for several years. It recorded a small technical surplus last year and it looks like that it is going to record a bigger surplus this year than was even projected on budget day, notwithstanding the views of some, including the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council, that it would not do so.

The State pension age is due to rise to 67 years in 2021 and 68 in 2028. It is true that we are doing this ahead of most other European countries, but other European countries are also raising the retirement age. The reform was introduced by my forebear in the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection, Deputy Burton, and we supported it because it was important to make pensions sustainable. I have a lot of sympathy for the Labour Party sometimes when it does not receive enough credit for the tough decisions it made when in government with us for five years. I do not believe it gets enough credit for that and have said this before. However, I have no sympathy for the fact that the Labour Party, largely for electoral reasons, is now trying to move away from reforms it introduced . That is unfortunate. It is as simple as this: in the 1970s the State pension age was, believe it or not, 70 years. The average man lived to 68 years and the average woman to 72. The whole idea was that, over the course of one's working life, one paid a small amount into a pension fund in order to have enough for the short number of years for which one would be retired. A wonderful thing has happened since in that life expectancy has improved. People are living much longer, which is great, but it raises questions about the sustainability of the pension system in the long term. If we do not start to raise the pension age now, we may find that people now in their 30s, 40s or 50s will not receive a pension at all at a certain point. Knowing that is why Deputy Burton introduced the reforms. Essentially, Deputy Howlin is saying that since we do not now have a problem, we should put off taking action. Is that not what was said about climate change 20 or 30 years ago? Is it not what was said about so many other things? It has been said that since we do not have the problem now, we should not fix it, that we should wait until it is a problem before we fix it. What Deputy Burton decided to do was to get ahead of the problem and make sure pension payments would be sustainable in the longer term by making reforms in order that we would not have to wait until there was a problem to fix. I am disappointed that the Labour Party has moved away from that position.

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