David Norris (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I want to apologise to the Minister in advance that I will not be able to stay for the whole of the debate because I have a radio interview later.

My matter is a personal interest but it does affect a number of people. Is the number of weeks' payment required, which has gone up quite considerably, retrospective? The reason I ask this is because I was in a scheme in Trinity College Dublin. About halfway through my period of employment there, the terms were changed and we stopped buying PRSI stamps. I inquired into it and I was entitled to a kind of truncated pension. I never took it up.

Partly on behalf of other members of the staff of Trinity College Dublin who were in the same position at the time, as well as people in other companies, I am curious to know if the number of weeks being increased affects people who historically had established rights. Will they now lose them because of the increase in the number of weeks?

As an aside, I gave up that pension because I thought there were enough people dragging out of the State and I had more than enough money to live on. It turned up in the bloody newspapers that I was a pension fraud and a social welfare cheat, swindling Trinity College Dublin out of a pension for years.