Darragh O'Brien (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will be brief because I have specific amendments regarding pensions, which I will table later. This section deals with changes in the normal retirement age and I ask the Minister of State to consider airline pilots and others in non-public sector jobs who have to retire at 55. They now cannot access their pension, or any State benefits, until the age of 67. This is something that cannot be fixed in this Bill. I give pilots as an example because they are not allowed to continue flying for medical reasons but there are others and in the public sector we have the same situation with gardaí. At some stage we will need to grapple with compulsory retirement ages. As Senator Mooney said, many people want to continue working so why do we make it impossible for them to do so? A late retirement option can be applied for through Revenue but that is on an individual case basis.

The overall pension provision is very worrying and most people will not realise that the pension liability coming down the track to us is multiples of what the banking liability was to the State. It will be a problem that will become far more apparent to people from 2030 onwards and it affects both private and public pension provision. I told the Tánaiste and Minister for Social Protection that never had so much been done to undermine the security of pensions and pension provision than has been done by the changes in pension regulations in the past couple of years, in particular the private pension levy whereby the pension pot was dipped into for some €2.4 billion. As a result of other changes in the Social Welfare and Pensions Act 2013, employers can extricate themselves from promises they made to employees.

I produced a paper in 2009 which I sent to the then Minister for Finance, the late Brian Lenihan, and which I also sent to the current Minister, Deputy Michael Noonan, at the start of this Oireachtas term. It was on the subject of how we would actually fund public sector pensions. In the future, it will not be acceptable for public sector pensions to be paid out of current Government expenditure. At some stage we will have to set up a hybrid arrangement whereby new entrants' increments to existing public sector pensions go into a separate pension fund. Some investments will come back from the National Pensions Reserve Fund, which was rightly used in our crisis situation, but we have to look at doing it again by starting a separate fund. I am not talking about changing existing benefits in the public sector and, as far as I am concerned, what one has one holds, but for those joining in the future we should move towards a hybrid arrangement with a mix of defined benefit and defined contribution so that the State will at least have an idea of what its liability will be and can meet it into the future. It is not for this Bill right now but it is something all parties need to have a serious think about in the run-up to the general election and whatever the make-up of the next Government, it will need to prioritise pensions. We are proposing that there be a pensions Minister, even if it is at a junior level, to encourage a complete focus on the issue.

I will talk about the merging of the Financial Services Ombudsman and the Pensions Ombudsman later on. People who have to retire because of their employment are not dealt with in this Bill and we should look at including them in the future.