Regina Doherty (Meath East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Senator was looking for the report to satisfy herself as to who was going to be excluded from receiving a full pension on the basis of not having either 20 years work with 20 years caring or 30 years work with ten years caring. The difficulty I have with this is that it is not new. The move to this model was flagged back in 1994, and the reason we changed from 260 initial contributions to qualify, increasing to 520 in 2012 - which is the adversity people speak about, and the changes to rate bands that affected people - was because people's work practices over the years had changed. People had longer to apply for all of the years worked required to get a full pension. If I understand the Senator correctly, she is suggesting that something that is worth €300,000 to €400,000 should be achievable after only ten years of work. I am sorry, but I fundamentally and absolutely do not agree with her. We have made the changes and are moving to a total contributions model because there are people in this country who are in receipt of full pensions with only ten years work, while, at the same time, there are people living here for 30 or 40 years who have gaps in their work records because of caring and who are not in receipt of full pensions.First, the actuarial value is recognised in so far as one cannot expect the State to provide somebody with a pension package of €300,000 or €400,000 off the back of only ten years' work. That is the reason we are deliberating at the moment on whether it should be 30 years, inclusive of ten years caring credits, or 40 years, inclusive of 20 years of caring credits. The premise of the deliberations is to make sure that we capture the most people we can for the highest rate, but doing the report that is sought will not feed into those deliberations. If the report is looking for a backbone to stand down the fact that the minimum contributions should not be 520 but 260, then all of the previous Governments that have established the principles of the policy issues from 1994 to where we are today do not concur with the way the Senator is thinking.