Public service pension eligibility and service disparities
Keating asks whether public servants should qualify for pro rata pensions after 30 years and challenges disparities in service required for equal pensions. MacSharry says pensions generally begin at 60 and earlier payments would substantially increase costs; he disputes the claimed inequity, while Keating offers to provide examples.
asked the Minister for the Public Service if he proposes to introduce a scheme whereby public service employees would be able to retire, in line with some other professions, on a pro rata pension anytime after 30 years' service.
30.
Comment on this
asked the Minister for the Public Service if he considers the situation to be equitable and just that some members of the public service are obliged to work well over 40 years in order to obtain a pension which other employees in the public sector get after much shorter service.
Comment on this
With the permission of the Ceann Comhairle, I propose to take Questions Nos. 29 and 30 together.
The minimum age at which a retirement pension may be paid in the public service is generally 60 years. Accordingly, depending upon the age at which employment commenced, some public servants will have more than 40 years' service when they qualify for pension. To allow pension to commence at an earlier age would increase the cost of superannuation. For example, to pay a pension at age 50 costs approrimately twice as much as to pay the same pension at age 60 and I do not consider, therefore, that a reduction in pension age is warranted.
I would draw attention to the fact that up to recently a public servant who resigned before the minimum retiring age forfeited all of his pensionable service. However, facilities are now available which enable a public servant, who has at least five years' service, and who wishes to leave his employment before reaching the retiring age, to have his accrued entitlement to pension and lump sum preserved, and brought into payment on an uprated basis at age 60.
Comment on this
Whatever about the scandals and injustices of the past would the Minister accept that there is a substantial degree of injustice about a situation which asks one man to work perhaps twice as long as a colleague of his in the same public service for the same pension? Surely that is something, despite the difficulties, that all governments should be working towards eliminating.
Comment on this
The Minister admitted that people have been working for different numbers of years for the same pension.
Comment on this
That is the case and if the Minister is not aware of it I will forward him details of a number of cases.
