Marc MacSharry (Fianna Fail)

It is drawing nearer in any event. Many of my friends, none of whom was contributing to pension schemes, laughed at me and stated that it was my tough luck. Perhaps I will eventually have the last laugh. These are some of the reasons the people who will be most vulnerable when the time comes have not bought into the process.

In discussions on the Green Paper, perhaps we could consider the introduction of SSIA-type schemes. It is interesting, however, that the pension-incentive tax credit scheme — which post-dated the payment of SSIAs — attracted only 1% of people. That is significant.

As already stated, this is one of the biggest challenges we face. The population is getting older. There are positives in that Ireland currently has the lowest number of people over the age of 65 among EU member states. That gives us time and creates a window of opportunity to allow us to be proactive and tackle this matter in the most effective way.

This issue is non-political and cross-party in nature. While we may kick many a political football around this and the Lower House and beat up one another in respect of all sorts of issues, it is my opinion that there would be broad agreement on this matter. There also would be broad agreement that this is a good news story. The Green Paper is good and we look forward to having an input into the debate on it. I hope that solid actions will eventually result from the publication of the White Paper that will follow this one.

The publication of a Green Paper is likely to be regarded as one of the most important events in a Government's term of office. Such a document is deserving of the closest scrutiny. The future direction of policy in this area is obviously vital to the long-term health of the economy. Any decisions we take on foot of the publication of this paper will have profound and long-term consequences.

I do not wish to be overly repetitive and everyone recognises the importance of this matter. In my opinion, significant innovation will be required to allow us to arrive at an optimum solution. I will be preparing a submission, which, I hope, will help in some way. I also hope that everybody prepares a submission.

I ask the Minister to focus our efforts on encouraging those people who are of the opinion that, at this stage, pensions are not remotely relevant to them to buy into making contributions. We should be innovative and develop a system under which people could, at key stages of their lives up to a maximum age of 45, reap the benefits of pension funds that are performing well.

I thank the Minister for coming before the House. I again thank my colleagues from the Progressive Democrats for using their Private Members' time to table this most important of motions, which I obviously support.