Sean Barrett (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for what she said about the statutory guidelines. As in many of these matters, we are trying to prevent recurrences and we are trying to run things better from this day forward. I believe that is the function of the Seanad and the Oireachtas, and that is what we have come into the Houses of the Oireachtas to do. I thank the Minister for her open-mindedness towards what we are saying. There may be other reasons that we, the Minister and her Department will think of as to why schemes crashed. I thank Senator Darragh O'Brien. Part of the reason I tabled the amendments is that I saw a scheme do this to itself. The Minister mentioned the research institutes and so on. Here were people, who were not short of giving all sorts of advice on how other people should run their affairs, behaving scandalously in the conduct of a pension fund. It is wrong that a group of people in a room decide to award themselves added years and then send it down to Busáras because there is a Minister for Social Protection there who they believe will bail them out.

On the costs, the industry has to be made competitive with the UK. The Minister said we have too many small schemes and that perhaps the investment opportunities are not big enough. This is an era of free trade. It is not a good excuse for pension fund people to tell the Minister they did not think they could invest as well as pension fund people from other countries. The high cost of sheltered sector services and the inefficiency of the financial sector are major reasons we are in this room now.

On the issue of longevity, I do not know what standards actuaries have that they did not use information which the Central Statistics Office, located in the Department of the Taoiseach, has been publishing since it was founded 70 or 80 years ago. It is no secret that people are living longer and it is no good having people feign surprise when they come to see the Minister. If there are any other reasons, I want to hear them.

The Minister did not refer, in particular, to the role of the Department of Finance but it would not be right if undue pressure were put on the Minister for Social Protection. The Minister for Finance, as the custodian of the public purse, should engage in some kind of dialogue rather than, as my colleagues have said, just giving approval. Again, our history of bailouts tends to be that line Departments get the pressure put on them. Nobody would wish to repeat the incorporeal Cabinet meetings dealing with large amounts of money. I do not know the definition of such a meeting but the Minister might consider some formal proceedings because, as we said earlier, the Minister for Finance's rubber stamp is not what we need.

The EU directive worries me. Sometimes, the Europeans tell us to do things which we know do not make sense. For example, we had the car insurance increase for women drivers under some kind of equality. Women got lower car insurance because they were better drivers and I did not see anything wrong with that.