Sean Barrett (Independent)

I can envisage a situation where successor Senators in the mould of Senator Ivana Bacik will argue for the raising of the retirement age past 70 as a human rights issue. The fashions in these matters tend to change.

I support the measures the Minister is introducing in this Bill as a necessary correction to the public finances. I take this opportunity to warn against any future recurrence of the benchmarking exercise, which must surely have added hugely to the difficulties facing the State in this area. Apart from anything else, it was not at all transparent. The evidence for the increases under that scheme, which was always hotly disputed, was kept secret so that those who wondered why they had done rather badly out of it could not discover why others had done so well. I am sure benchmarking is not on the Minister's agenda in any shape or form, and it should never arise again. It was a considerable factor in the inequities that arose in public sector pay in recent years, with the largest increases generally given to the most highly paid public servants while the less well paid received only the averages under the national wage agreements.

In addition, some public sector pension funds, including those in the university sector, in the Economic and Social Research Institute, Institute of Public Administration and elsewhere, went broke and had to be rescued by the former Minister for Finance, the late Brian Lenihan. The conduct of the trustees of those funds deserves some rebuke from the Minister and the House. With practices such as added years and so on, they almost became a type of slush fund for the beneficiaries. These trustees ultimately succeeded in bankrupting their own pensions, although that does not prevent them from giving advice to the Minister on how to run the country.

As well as dealing with public pensions, we must also look at the private pensions fund industry, including its poor overall performance and the general move from defined benefit to defined contribution schemes. Although I appreciate that it is a short-term measure, there is an inequity in the imposition of a levy on private pension funds in that it imposes further costs on those who are already bearing the cost of pensions which are far better than their own. The Minister has made a sizeable contribution to addressing the difficulties with public sector pensions. I would be glad to assign him the duty of reforming private sector pensions, if he has any spare time in the coming months.