Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

There is a danger in the Government's policy of setting up a commission to review the pension age.

This commission, chaired by a senior civil servant at the Revenue, will examine the sustainability and eligibility issues and outline options for the Government to address issues, including qualifying age, contribution rates, total contributions and eligibility requirements. One would have to be naive in the extreme to believe that this commission is not going to offer a fig leaf to Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, who intend to do what they were going to do before they realised during the previous general election that raising the pension age to 67 was an issue for their voters.

I want to make a more general point about the way the pensions issue is often framed. We continually hear that there is a pensions time bomb, that pensions are unsustainable and the Social Insurance Fund will run out if we keep paying at the present levels. To many economists and experts, the fact that people live longer seems to be a disaster. Longevity seems to be a problem. I find that amazing. We in People Before Profit start from the position that the fact that people live longer is a huge plus and should be celebrated. Commentary often forgets or conveniently ignores the fact that although people in this generation are living longer than their forbears, almost all of them were much more productive during their working lives. Any sane society would see longevity and increased productivity during working life as balancing out, but that is not the case here.

The second scare story around pensions relates to the Social Insurance Fund. Supposedly, if we do not extend the working life of ordinary workers beyond 66 years, the fund will not meet its obligations to pay the State pension contributory. It is hinted that unless we massively increase workers' pay-related social insurance, PRSI, contributions, we will have to extend their working lives. There is a second option, which is rarely mentioned by any Government Minister or economist. We could increase the employers' contributions to the Social Insurance Fund. Our fund has one of the lowest employer contribution rates in Europe. Anything seen as a cost to employers is frowned upon, regardless of the level of profits in the country. Ireland's social wage is still the poor man of Europe. Moreover, the National Pensions Reserve Fund was raided in 2009 and 2010 to the tune of €20.7 billion. The Government raided it to bail out private banks. It is now saying it cannot afford to maintain this fund and so people will have to work longer.

I would like to address the idea that this crisis is happening because pensions are expensive and paying pensioners is a burden, whether in the private or the public sector. It is often presented as a straightforward question of maths. It is not. The never-ending pension scheme crises in the private and semi-State sectors are not natural events caused by longevity or the underfunding of the schemes concerned. A large part of the crisis is caused by the fact that the returns on private investments made by the schemes have been declining over the decades. They have been declining because of the fall in yields on the bonds, equities and even property in which many of these funds are invested. This is not a natural occurrence, nor is it the fault of the workers who suffer as a result. The fall in yields is a deeper sign of the malaise in the system of capitalism.

Workers see pensions as deferred wages, and they are right. It is ironic that the early struggles of the labour movement in this country were fought over the right to a pension and some security on retirement. The attack on pensioners today is part of a war on workers and ordinary decent people. In the past few months, Covid-19 has exposed the many deficits in our system of income supports. It has simultaneously revealed what can be achieved when civil society makes a collective effort to ensure those social supports. We support this Bill wholeheartedly. We reject the idea that any commission observing the pretence of independence will come back with anything other than a fig leaf for what the Government intended to do in the first place.

See this speech in context