Brendan Smith (Cavan-Monaghan, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

As the Minister will be aware, a cohort of people have reached, or about to reach, pension age, and they have been paying social insurance contributions towards a contributory pension. Now they have found that because their insurance record was broken while they were in receipt of the farm assist payment, they are now entitled only to a reduced contributory pension.

I believe that this is a small cohort of people. I am very anxious that those people who had to go on the farm assist payment because of reduced farm income should, for the periods they were in receipt of the payment, be given due recognition with contributions credited to their insurance record to ensure they are not all deprived of the full contributory pension.

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