Joe O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

The Deputy is referring to the broader challenges of the ageing population in the years ahead. I may touch on that context in some of the proposals in the reform of the pension system. These include flexibility of the age of draw-down, which will be introduced from January. A person with less than 40 years of contributions may be able to use the period between the ages of 66 and 70 years to build up additional entitlements. The long-term sustainability of the State pension system is to be addressed through gradual incremental increases in social insurance rates, which has happened, the introduction of enhanced State pension provision for long-term carers of incapacitated dependants and a smoothed earnings method of calculating the benchmarking index rate of State pension payments, which is to be introduced as an input into the annual budget process and submitted to the Government in September each year. We have started that process. Those are some of the measures we are undertaking to ensure sustainability in the long term.

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