Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

Fair play to the Minister for staying this long into the debate. Often we see Ministers run before parties such as ours get to contribute, in fairness to her.

The prospect of the pension age being raised to 67 was widely touted before the election and hammered the appeal of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael among the bracket of voters who were affected. Before the election, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael decided to put the pin back in the grenade and oppose in that election the pension age being raised. However, like so many of the commitments of the Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael Government before the election, that commitment has disappeared like snow off a ditch. When the immediate fear of losing votes dissipated, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael reneged on their commitment once again.

The Minister, Deputy Michael McGrath, has announced that a can-kicking commission will be created to consider the issue of pensions and whether the age should be raised to 67. Why can Governments not make decisions? Why can they not fulfil commitments they make in election cycles? The idea that this decision cannot be made by the Government on logical, ideological and policy grounds is a nonsense. The fact that it is being kicked to a commission is as per the age-old tradition, as old as this House itself, that when a decision gets hard to make the Government kicks it down the road to a committee of some sort. If both parties were truly committed to the pension age staying at 66, it would have been in the programme for Government and that detail would have been in the budget. When politicians talk about this being a time bomb, do they mean the ratio of workers to pensioners is a time bomb or that this is a time bomb in political terms that will blow up in their faces yet again? I fear the latter is the Government's biggest concern.

Let us be open and honest here. Fine Gael is seeking to raise the pension age to 68. That is incredible. Fine Gael is seeking that Irish men and Irish women be forced to work an additional three years before they are able to retire. This makes Ireland an outlier in European terms. Even in Britain they are not seeking to raise the pension age to 68 until 2046. That is 18 years later than in this State. The truth of the matter is that when establishment parties are in a fiscal squeeze, they often see that they should go down the path of least resistance to raise funds or to save money. I think many in the political class see pensioners as a path of least resistance, but I assure the Minister they are not. If there is one group of people in this country who will fight for their income and their standard of living, it is pensioners. They have led the way in showing my generation what is important and how to fight for it.

The Fine Gael and Labour Party Government raised the pension age from 65 to 66 to pay for its austerity economics, and the squeeze is still on. Those obliged by contracts to retire at 65 have to go on jobseeker payments for one year before they can access the State pension. The new total contributions approach has been brought in to replace the old averaging system and means that people now need 2,080 contributions, the equivalent of 40 years of PRSI contributions, to qualify for the full State pension. What are the ramifications of this Fine Gael policy? The truth of the matter is that many of the people in this age cohort do heavy physical work, and many of those people will be forced to do that physical work in the future until old age, literally. As a result of the housing crisis, many people now either have mortgages with super long terms or are renting accommodation because they cannot afford to buy any more. These individuals will be hard-pressed to pay for either pensions or rents in later life. Let us compare this to what happens to Teachtaí Dála. Deputies leave this House - through resignation, retirement or whatever else - and get a golden handshake first of all and then an extremely high pension for the rest of their lives, while working men and women are left in fear and anxiety, wondering how and at what age they will be able to retire.

All this time, one of the biggest sins in the Irish political system is the over-concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people. In international terms, 62 people have as much wealth as half the population of this planet, and similar trends are happening in this country because of tax injustice. The Minister should look elsewhere in trying to find the path of least resistance.

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