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

The Leas-Cheann Comhairle should not be embarrassed at all at mistaking Deputy McAuliffe for Deputy Richmond. I am regularly mistaken for the Taoiseach and we look nothing alike. I can see no reason anyone could not make an honest mistake about the two Deputies.

On the question at hand, this is a long-standing issue. It has been a problem for more than a decade. Five Governments have tried to deal with it. There is a fundamental difficulty in solving the problem. CE supervisors appear to be seeking a public sector pension but they are not public servants. They were never hired as public servants and did not make a contribution to the public service pension scheme throughout their working lives, in the way every other public servant does. If we give a public sector pension to somebody who is not a public servant and who did not make public sector pension contributions, the knock-on demands would be incalculable. This is the problem. We need to be honest with ourselves about this and to be honest with them about it. Perhaps we can do something prospective for future pensions. Perhaps we could do something in terms of a retrospective recognition gratuity. This is the space in which there might be a solution and not in conceding something that was not true.

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