Dáil debates

Tuesday, 22 June 2021

State Pension Age: Motion [Private Members]

 

7:40 pm

Photo of Peadar TóibínPeadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

Cuirim fáilte roimh an rún seo. I hope the parties will support the Aontú amendment to ensure convergence between the pension ages in the North and South of Ireland. At the moment there is a difficulty with regard to the pension in the North of Ireland.

It is symptomatic of the two-tier Ireland in which we live that when it comes to retirement, there is one rule for the elites and another for hard-working men and women. Deputies, whether they get voted of office or resign, will leave with golden handshakes to see them well and in wealth in their years of retirement. All the while, working men and women throughout the country live in fear and anxiety about whether they will have enough money to afford to retire. The gulf is enormous. A massive chasm exists in this country between the ruling elites and the people on the ground. I firmly believe that the vast majority of people in government do not even recognise how differently they treat themselves from the people on the street. If one were to look for an example of that, one need only look to the ongoing €25,000 a day for this building.

In November 2020, amid the global crisis in health and the economy, the Government voted to upgrade the golden handshake pensions for former taoisigh and top civil servants. The Government gave them a platinum handshake pension by restoring the cuts made to those pensions. It costs the taxpayer €12 million every year to do this. At the same time, the Government voted against giving any pay to student nurses. This is another example of how differently members of the Government treat themselves from the rest of the country. This can be contrasted with the failure of the Government to find so much as a tenner for pensioners in the €18 billion budget. Quite simply, there is a chasm between lawmakers and the people on the street. The hallmark of a civilised society is how we treat the most vulnerable. God knows that the most vulnerable in the crisis we have been through are the older members of our society. If the hallmark is how we treat them, the Government has failed very badly.

At the moment, people are in many cases obliged to retire at 65 under their contracts. They are then forced onto jobseeker's payments for one year before being allowed access the State pension at 66. That is an absolute nonsense. It again shows the lack of professional administration in this country. This strange year people experience at the end of their working lives shows a lack of ordinary competency in administration. Ireland is to have a pension age far older than those of the majority of our European counterparts. England does not plan to move its pension age to 68 until 2046, 18 years after this Government expects this move to be made in Ireland.

There will be a change in the demographics in the next 40 years. There will be just 2.3 people of working age for every pensioner. The new total contribution approach brought in to replace the old averaging system means that people need 2,080 contributions to qualify for a full State pension. That is the equivalent of 40 full years of PRSI contributions. Just under six in ten Irish workers have some sort of pension to supplement the State pension. We are looking at a major difficulty over the next while because of that. It should be remembered that many older people locked themselves into significantly long mortgages to buy their houses. It should also be remembered that there is a significant cohort of older people who are in rented accommodation while the price of rent is radically increasing. This is happening at a time when the opportunity to get the full pension is narrowing and when the age at which someone is eligible is getting older.

The Government says that it will launch an auto-enrolment pension scheme some time in 2022. People will make contributions equal to 1.5% of salary, rising to 8% after ten years of work. What progress has been made on this? When will the Government be in a position to fulfil this pledge? Will pensioners once again be left in uncertainty? Shameful brazen politics have been played in respect of the issue of pensions over the past while. In January and February, the pensions issue threatened to define the election of 2020. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael had to quickly row back on their previous plans to raise the pension age. Significantly, they did so just to deal with the electoral backlash coming their way at the time. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael decided to get together to put a pin in the grenade that was about to go off.

Both parties stated they would oppose raises in the pension age. However, like so many of the commitments from Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, it disappeared like snow off a ditch once the election was over. What did they do? They pulled a very common trick in Irish politics and created a commission to do two things - kick the can down the road and transfer responsibility from them in the decision-making process. If the Government opposes the increase in the pension age, why does it not just state that it opposes it? Why the need for a commission at all? Why the inability to stand up for what one believes on obvious and simple issues of justice such as this? It is incredible that both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael speak about opposing the raising of the pension age but both see a commission to do just that as being the solution.

My concern is that raising the pension age will be part of an economic payback for the fiscal mismanagement of the Covid crisis by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in government. It must be remembered that Governments have form in this regard. Successive Governments have sought to recoup economic losses at the expense of the rights and entitlements of the most vulnerable and hard-working in society. To bail out the banking sector in 2008, medical cards were attacked and retirees were told that although the crisis was not of their making, they were nonetheless expected to pay to bail out the offenders. Fast forward to today and this crisis, which is not the fault of older people, yet the Government has its eye on their pockets to see if it can pick them to pay for the costs of the crisis. In 2011, Fine Gael and the Labour Party in their first year in government legislated to raise the pension age from 65 to 68 incrementally. It was incredible for the Labour Party or any party that says it is based on the legacy of James Connolly to see the pockets of those aged 67 or 68 as the solution to the financial crisis the country was in. In the run-up to the general election in 2020, we saw Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil reject that policy for fear of losing votes but now their policy is actually indistinguishable from it and they are just awaiting the most politically opportune time to push through the increase in the pension age.

Aontú is an all-Ireland party. We are a 32-county Irish republican party. We want to see convergence on the island of Ireland in all aspects - economically, socially and in the delivery of public services - but we also want to see convergence with regard to incomes and pensions. It is wrong that pension ages in the North of Ireland are different from those in the South of Ireland. It is important that political parties speaking on this side of the Border do so with the same language up North as well because people in the North of Ireland listen to what parties say here and they want to make sure the parties fulfil those words in the Six Counties too. We in Aontú have proposed an amendment seeking the convergence of the pension ages North and South and we ask the political parties here to support that amendment.

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