David Cullinane (Sinn Fein)

This is the so-called enabling clause which provides for the Minister to uprate current public service pension schemes in line with the consumer price index but at an undetermined point in the future. That is part of our problem with it.

As this may be my last opportunity to speak on this section I want to indicate that we will be opposing the Bill. As I said earlier, we support career averaging and linking the pensions in payment to the CPI. That makes sense in terms of the logic the Minister outlined earlier. A situation could arise where somebody is appointed to the position of a county manager, remains in that position for a number of months and their pension is then calculated on their final salary. We fully accept the logic of the career averaging, which makes perfect sense, and the need to link pensions in payment to the CPI but our problem is that linkage is done at some undetermined point. That is one of our difficulties with it.

We also have a difficulty with what we would see as a two-tier element to this where new entrants to the public service will be treated differently from some existing public servants. We have had that debate but that is a genuine concern on our part. I accept that the Minister has gone some way to addressing what are important issues affecting public pensions which needed to be addressed.