Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein)
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Question 165: To ask the Minister for Finance the reason the national pensions framework which he recently published projects that spending on public pensions will increase to 15% by 2050 whereas the OECD country report on Ireland, the contents of which was signed off by the Government, projects a significantly lower increase. [12621/10]

Brian Lenihan Jnr (Dublin West, Fianna Fail)
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The OECD Economic Survey: Ireland 2009, which was published last November, contains pension cost projections for Ireland which were taken from the 2009 Ageing Report which was prepared by the European Commission and published at the end of last April. These projections were based on a set of assumptions which ensured comparability between all EU Member States. The reason for the different results in these two publications is that pension projections included in the National Pensions Framework were based on a different set of assumptions and covered a different reference period to those in the 2009 Ageing Report. Notwithstanding these differences, however, both sets of projections show the same picture of continuously increasing pension costs over the long term. The Government's decision to set out radical and wide-scale reform of the Irish pension system was taken in light of this long-term outlook.