Caithfimid cloí leis an gclog.

Ireland's pension gap has widened in the lifetime of this Government and the previous one. Women work outside home in fewer numbers with most getting paid less when they do. When it comes to retirement, women now typically have 37% less to live on than men. On 21 September the Taoiseach announced plans for a new pension strategy to be completed by the end of the year, including a five-year roadmap for pension reform. As Minister for Social Protection, he also committed to conduct an overall pension review that was to be completed by the middle of this year. It is now almost October and it is not known if that pension review has been completed, let alone published.

Many women who got up early in the morning for years to work or look after the nation's children are now entering an insecure impoverished retirement. They will have limited access to pensions because of low pay, poor conditions of work and having to take time out for caring responsibilities. Women who worked on family farms and in family businesses also do not have social insurance coverage meaning they are totally reliant on their husbands in older age. What steps will the Government take to analyse the differential impacts of pension policy for men and women? Will it redress these glaring, flagrant inequalities among pensioners currently in receipt of benefits?

Lack of access to the homemaker's scheme has led to experiences of severe inequality for an entire generation of women in the State pension system. The homemaker's scheme only allows for the backdating of pension contributions to 1994. What about all the women before 1994? Let us not forget the State-enforced marriage bar, which up to 1973 meant women had no choice but to give up their public service and Civil Service jobs when they got married. Tens of thousands of women are out in the cold and are forgotten. They do not receive equal treatment because of a sudden unfair cut-off point of 6 April 1994. This is simply not good enough; they deserve better. The Taoiseach has said he plans to reward work and enterprise in the budget and yet he has claimed that pensions for these women, forcibly barred from work by the State, would be too expensive. Indeed they should be paid reparations and not a mere State pension. It is never too late to do the right thing.

Will the Government commit to backdating the homemaker's scheme to 1973, rather than this discriminatory cut-off point of 1994? When will the Government publish the review on the differentiated impacts of pension policy? Will this be published before any new strategy is conducted or will the Government continue its penchant for revolving-door Ministries that never seem to finish any jobs they start?

The Deputy raises a very important issue. There is widespread under-provision in pensions and, as she rightly said, the under-provision is much more acute among women workers than among male workers. While I do not have the figures to hand today, from memory less than half of workers had access to any pension support other than the State contributory scheme. This has been a feature of our provision over many years.

Deputy Burton is in the Chamber. I know the previous Government took action to ensure that every employer would have to provide the option of a scheme to every worker. Therefore there is an obligation on employers to provide such a scheme. The State, of course, supports though tax breaks people participating in such a scheme. The wider issues of whether there should be compulsory contribution into a scheme or whether it should be automatic enrolment with an obligation to drop out are very significant and need to be assessed in detail. Obviously much work is required initially assessing the potential impact of them and considerable consultation on them would be required.

I do not have access to when the work will be completed, but it is a very important issue which poses problems for long-term funding for all of us as we live longer and remain reliant on the State for much longer.

The State pension, which was introduced in 1953, was based on contributions by people who were at work. That has been the model and access is done by way of averaging over one's entire life. That has favoured people who, for example, entered late and were just in the scheme for a short period and get a full pension while others, as Deputy Catherine Martin described, who drop out for periods can have their rights diluted. One of the issues that has been examined by the Department is whether one should move to a total contribution approach rather than using the averaging rule. The difficulty with such a change is that there could be losers as well as winners in such a scheme.

I understand the Department has indicated in the course of replies to parliamentary questions that the law would have to change retrospectively for homemakers and that would have a significant cost. From recollection, more than €250 million would be involved. Again, it would have to be assessed in the context of other budgetary options that fall to be considered by the State. This is a complex area and having a full pension review that evaluates all of those issues, and tries to decide where the allocation of responsibility falls between employers, individuals and the State, requires careful work. I look forward to that review which has not come to Government at this point.

I thank the Minister but, with respect, it is hard for those women who have been denied their pension entitlements to take all that he has said at face value given that actions taken by this and the previous Government, rather than addressing the inequalities in the pension-pay gap, have only allowed them to deepen. In 2012, the previous Government introduced changes to the eligibility criteria for the contributory State pension. That had the effect of increasing the number of PRSI contributions required for the higher payments and women are most likely to lose out because of periods out of the workforce due to family responsibilities or having held part-time employment.

Of the 36,000 people the Department of Social Protection records as being affected by the changes from June 2016, more than 62% were women. Will the Government reverse the 2012 changes to pension contributions? As budget 2018 approaches, I remind the Minister that women benefit less from cuts to income tax as they are more likely to find themselves in part-time and low-paid jobs and take time out from work for unpaid care responsibilities. The priority in the upcoming budget should lie in investment in public services and any tax cuts need to be in the form of progressive taxation that will benefit women and men equally.

One has to bear in mind what was done in 2012. The system that prevailed before that meant that someone who perhaps had made 1,000 contributions over his or her entire life could get a 98% pension and someone who had made double those contributions over his or her life would get the same pension. There was an effort to relate more fairly the amount of pension provided to the contribution record of the individual. It is a contributory scheme. To move away from that principle of relating to a reasonable degree the eligibility to the contributions would be a strange direction for policy to take. We must try to build a system where people make contributions and employers also make contributions and we build up both the State element and the private element to give adequate pension cover. That is the challenge we have. I do not think we can assume that those who made a lesser contribution can automatically get the same amount as those who made a greater contribution. That is the dilemma we face.

Deputy Catherine Martin is correct that we need to look in particular at the position of women in the workforce. That is an issue that will have to be addressed in the wider policy but it is part of a bigger picture which will dominate discussion over many years.