Shane Curley (Fianna Fail)

I will not repeat everything that has been said about the positives of this move except to say that I hugely welcome the movement towards auto-enrolment. One of the huge positives I see that has not been mentioned today by Senators is the mobility of the fund. Nowadays, people do not have lifelong careers in one particular job as much as they did previously. The fact that the fund moves with the person as he or she goes from job to job is hugely welcome.

I would like to pick up, respectfully, on a couple of points Senator McCormack made about the Government being out of touch on this. What would be out of touch is to allow us to move towards an apocalyptic scene in 30 or 40 years' time, when I hope I will be retiring, where there is no money left in the country if we allow things to develop the way they currently are. There is a runaway train of people at retirement age and not enough young people coming through the system to actually contribute PRSI to allow for elderly people to be looked after. I really do care about the care of the elderly. That is something we need to have a conversation on. I respectfully disagree with what the Senator said on that.

I also raise the issue of a €1 billion bonanza for the private sector. Who is going to pay for the public to actually administer the funds? Will it be the same squeezed taxpayer that we have right now? We will either cost the State a fortune or trust private companies with the system. I respectfully disagree with the points that were made.

I will share some of the concerns that were raised regarding ESG and ethical investment of the funds. There was a talk in the audiovisual room about this recently. I really appreciated the presentation that was given but we did not get a huge amount of clarity about the actual ethical side of the investments. I would share some concerns about when people work hard for 30 or 40 years and put some of their money in an auto-enrolled pension that we are sure it is being invested in ethical causes. It is important we have the clarity on that because they are trusting the State with their money. We need to make sure that we play an active role in the monitoring of the ESG side of this.

As a secondary school teacher, I would love to see far more financial well-being education at second level. If a culture could be embedded through conversations in the classroom that would allow for financial hygiene to be a norm in the mind of a young person leaving secondary school, we might not see people pulling out of this and the opt-out clause may not even be in people's minds in a few years' time. The tapering off of the fund as regards the risk level is hugely welcome. It is a very clever move on the Government's part to allow that little bit of risk for those in their 20s and 30s and to taper it off.