David Norris (Independent)

I support my colleague, Senator O'Toole, in asking for a debate on the national pensions reserve fund which would be very useful. In the debate, we should consider the wider aspects of pension provision, particularly the disgraceful anomalies that exist. I refer in particular to the case of an Army pensioner who wrote to me. He was a contributor to the contributory pension scheme but he has had one subtracted from the other. This is an anomaly because younger Army personnel do not suffer from this and given the enormous sums of money in the national pensions reserve fund, the decent approach is to pay the victims of this type of mean-minded anomaly.

When we have looked after pensioners, perhaps we could build a metro with the rest of the pension fund.