Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)

-----actually dealt with how we deal with public sector pensions, especially the issues with members of the Garda and fast-accruing pensions. The way he suggested doing that was to change the valuation rate for defined pensions. That is not what the Government has done, so do not be going into the box and saying this is about gardaí and all the rest and public sector pensions. If the Government wants to deal with public sector workers, de Buitléir has proposed a change to the valuation rate, which used to be a factor of 20 and is now a range of factors on a sliding scale. I raised this with the Minister's predecessor in relation to the appropriateness of that valuation factor and how many people outside the public sector have defined benefit schemes. These are questions we would need to tease out. I would argue there are ways, because we differentiate in the tax code in terms of the standard fund threshold and the chargeable excess already. There is already a differentiation between private workers and public sector workers and we can take that further in relation to exempting the income above the standard fund threshold for public sector workers. As such, there are a number of ways the Government could do this if it wants to genuinely deal with the issue of the very few public sector workers who are in that category of pensions in excess of €90,000 in the first instance.

That is not the issue here. The issue here is that the Government has brought forward a massive tax break for wealthy people. Taxpayers' money is going into these people's pockets to supplement gold-plated pensions.

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