Sinéad Gibney (Dublin Rathdown, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I will jump on one phrase the Minister used. I know it has been essentially a policy that Government spokespeople have used. It is that people are "able" to work after the age of 55. I raised this question on the back of a meeting I had with Dublin firefighters and their union representatives last week. They spoke to me about the specific dangers that their vocation introduced into their lives. They simply have lower life expectancies and poorer quality of life after retirement and higher incidences of cancer and addiction. Recent research from the World Health Organization, WHO, backs this up further. It is not good enough that we are simply saying to firefighters and people in those uniformed services that they can just work after that age. The stopgap of bringing it forward to the age of 62 is welcome but it is not enough and the Minister knows this because, as an Opposition TD, he tabled a motion in 2019 related to the Defence Forces that highlighted this issue. Will the Minister please tell me what he is actually going to do to help those firefighters who are retiring at the age of 55?

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