Mairead Farrell (Galway West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I commend my colleagues, Deputies Louise O'Reilly and Claire Keranne, on bringing forward this important motion. Throughout people's working lives, they knew the pension age always to be 65 years.

More than that, people were mentally geared up to retire at 65. The social contract which the State had with its citizens was broken by the Fine Gael and Labour Party Government when it brought into law increases in the pension age to 66 in 2014, to 67 in 2021 and 68 in 2028. It was a cruel twist of the knife in the backs of those who had worked all their lives, paid their taxes and followed the rules, only to be shafted in their autumn years. We see now that this law crafted by a Labour Party Minister is being stopped in its tracks, but only temporarily. We must now restore the broken social contract and remove the cruel unfairness from the future of our senior citizens.

When the pension age was first moved from 65 years old to 66, it was claimed that this was for budgetary reasons and financial hard times. Public service sector pay was also impacted at this time. Despite improvements in the economy, however, there was no talk of changing the pension age back to 65. Not only that, but it happened at the time when the Government also raided the private pension fund, which brought about a double whammy against older people who had worked all their lives trying to save for retirement. The Government put its hands in people's savings. One constituent wrote to me to say a massive lack of respect had been shown to people who had stayed at home and helped to build the economy through the bad economic times. It must be remembered that during the 1980s there were high incomes taxes and that during the crash of 2008 people like me were requested to take pay cuts, the universal social charge, USC, was introduced and part of our private pension fund was raided.

The reality is that our pension age of 66 is two years above the EU average of 64, despite us having nearly 30% fewer older people than other EU countries. In 2016, we spent 8% of our national income on public pensions, and this is to rise by less than 3% over the next 50 years, with us spending less on public pensions than most eurozone countries. Several months ago, an older man in my estate in Mervue in Galway city told me he had been working since he was 16 years old. He told me was in his 60s now, having worked all his life and he was being told, as he put it, by politicians in comfortable seats that he would have to continue to work for a few more years or go on to jobseeker's allowance. That man told me that had been running up and down ladders and doing hard physical labour. He had enjoyed it, made great friends and achieved a comfortable life for his family, but he said that he could not keep doing that now, because that level of physical labour takes its toll. The Minister is now asking that man to go on the jobseeker's allowance.

See this speech in context