Brendan Ryan (Labour)

Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit agus roimh an díospóireacht seo. It is probably the day for advertising one's age. I turned 60 during the summer and I do not feel or notice any difference. I understand 55 years is the age at which one joins the ranks of the elderly. Such categorisation is ridiculous. I believed that as much when I was 20 as I do now.

I am sorry I was not here for the Minister of State's speech but I read the script. I do not want to be misunderstood but, while I agree with the Minister of State on the need to ensure the provision of adequate resources for pensions, long-term care services for older people, housing and accommodation, ensuring mobility and so on, what he said implies — and I am sure it was not his intention — that the elderly are a group in need of special care. We use entirely different language about children. We see them as a huge benefit in society.

It would be worthwhile working out how much society spends through public, not private, provision on children from the moment of conception when we provide a reasonably inexpensive care service for pregnant women through to childbirth and on into childhood and primary and secondary education. It would be interesting to work out how much that 25 years costs and compare it with what is spent on people who work till they are 60 and probably have a reasonable chance of living another 20 years. What is the net cost to society of a 60 year old living on a decent income until they are 80, paying tax on that income, and probably paying tax on many of their purchases and, if they have a decent income, paying the highest rate of VAT because they might be indulging in slightly more luxurious things, so there would not be a huge proportion of their income spent on food? Work out then the net cost to society of provision for up to 25 years where no income tax will be paid because most services will be provided. When we work it out we begin to get away from the single biggest hang-up of society, namely, that we have an ageing crisis. Of course there are some issues. Any well ordered society must look at demographic change and plan for it. However, we are hopeless at doing this.

Since the 1970s, successive Governments have been warned that we will have a significant bubble of under 15 year olds, yet we ended up with prefabs, crowded schools and under-provision. We still have problems. I thought about complaining about the advertisements for the census to the Advertising Standards Authority of Ireland because they suggested we needed to assemble the information in the census to enable us to plan schools, hospitals etc. The overwhelming evidence is that we did not show a jot of interest in the projections or figures of previous censuses.

We need to address the issues. We have been told our age structure may shift within the next 40 years, but we must remember that this prediction is based on projections about population and childbirth rates, etc., which are drawn from the worst and lowest figures in terms of marriage and childbirth the State ever had. The circumstances have already changed and the figures produced five years ago are out of date. The story about the coming burden of an ageing population is not a burden; it is a change from a structure we had to another structure. If the structure was to change in the way projected, the single biggest element of our social welfare payments would be child benefit. If the country ends up with a dramatically different structure and with far fewer children and more older people, the payment of child benefit would obviously have to decrease. However, it is impossible to find anything in what has been written that addresses this and this is one of the reasons I would not dispute the importance of people making a provision for their future. Nevertheless, I do not see this in terms of retirement.

What we should consider is the number of years people should work in order to be able to enjoy the last third of their lives, rather than make provision for a dependent population. Do we believe that in an ideal world people should work as long as they are physically able at a level imposed on them from the outside? The level of activity of people such as Senator Maurice Hayes, for example, is what he chooses to do, not what he is coerced to do. I hope to be in the same position for the next 20 years. I do not want to sit in luxurious idleness for 20 years smoking my cigars in Cuba, perhaps, which is probably where certain people wish I would go. I do not want to do that.

We should look at the number of years people need to work in order to be able to live and enjoy the last third of their life — work 40 years for example. Perhaps they should be students for 20, work for 40 and then live for 20, not because they are not able to work nor because they are dependent or a burden, but because that is the way we choose to order our society. This turns all the arguments somewhat inside out.

Last Monday I was almost incandescent with rage to hear some bright young man from IBEC say the idea of defined benefit pensions was an old fashioned idea. What is the new fashioned idea? I accept restructuring is required to ensure people have a decent income when they are old. The suggestion from the young man from IBEC was that people should pay for the income they are to get when they are elderly themselves and that their employers should not have to pay and that they had no duty to their employees in this regard. This proposal uses a distorted argument about pensions to begin a process of gradually reducing the areas in which employers have any legal responsibility towards their employees. This is what the argument is about.

The level of gross domestic product the country would need to set aside in order to guarantee its older people a decent income — roughly half to two-thirds of what they were used to when working — is not unaffordable unless we subscribe to a particularly brutal low tax regime or to erecting barriers to immigration or presume we will have the same low level of fertility as we had for the past 20 years.

I read a long article in the Irish Banking Review about the so-called pensions crisis. One of the minor benefits of being an engineer is that one is not intimidated by numbers, graphs or statistics. Therefore, I could look past the article's nice lines which I know were written by economists who make the lines do what they want. The assumptions made in the article were that the economy would only grow 2.5% per annum over 40 years. That is way below the lowest average over 40 years in the history of the State. Second, the writer made the most pessimistic possible presumption about population structure and produced a projection on a graph for the year 2050. That graph was only as good as the assumptions, and they were wrong.

In terms of ageism, we must address the fact that we are not talking about a major change in life. The most fundamental change in people's lives comes when adolescents mature sexually, which is a profound change. Ageing is not like that for men, although women face another major life event which changes their lives. For men ageing is a continuum. This should be a continuum where people are supported to enjoy the best quality of life, whether working or not working. I have no problem with regard to defining a decent period for which people must work. I do not want to create a nation of lotus eaters. Neither do I subscribe to the idea that ageing and older people are a burden. Ageing is only a burden if we believe all people able to work should work until they are so ill that they cannot work any more. If we believe that, that is what we should debate.

On the other hand, if we believe the function of an economy is to provide a society in which people have responsibilities and duties and where society, in return, provides for people at every stage of their lives and if we accept the idea of older people as being among the beneficiaries of the wealth of a country, many of the issues of ageing will not arise. We will not have as many people needing to go into nursing homes. If we keep people alive and allow them be vital, they will retain their faculties in better order.

There is overwhelming evidence that older people will be more alert and less likely to suffer from the illnesses of ageing if they are intellectually alert and physically fit. They do not need this to be provided for them but simply need the income to be able to provide for themselves. They also need a cultural context in which they are not just tolerated but where it is regarded as good not to let our older people live in misery. Our job is to ensure that when people have worked for a decent period, if they have the good fortune to be in reasonable health, they have a further decent period in which they can enjoy the benefits of a decent income.

I am astonished at the failure of a market economy to recognise that there is an increasing proportion of people over 50 who have substantial disposable incomes. Unlike the giddy 25 year olds, people over 50 are not easily conned into buying things they do not need or want. They have to be persuaded that what is on sale is of some use or good to them. They are much tougher customers. There is a degree to which the market is infected with a form of ageism which overlooks them because they are far too crabbed, so to speak. They will not be fooled into buying electrical or consumer goods they do not need, yet there is market for services and provision based on real, intelligent and informed consumer decisions. Many of those trying to sell to the market have decided it is too much trouble and effort to sell to this potentially very lucrative market. This market does not require services offering Kruschen salts for constipation because they are people who have new and different needs which are just as positive as those of people in their 20s.