Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Senator for making those important points to which I have a number of responses. First, the system we have in place at the moment supports workers to make a private pension contribution. The tax relief that is available for them to do that offers support to 775,000 people in our State, which is 30% of those at work. Any changes to the marginal rate of tax support that is available to them has to take account of the fact that this is something that is helping workers to build up pension savings for later in life and the number of workers who are benefiting from that is over 700,000. It is the case that some of them are high earners but the vast majority are not-----