JUST PAY THEM WHAT YOU OWE!

Seán Mac Eoin was a hero of Independence who helped found Fine Gael. Now his nephew Eamon Tynan, who blew open the pensions scandal last week, says the party MUST do what’s morally right...

FINE Gael was under mounting pressure last night to restore the full State pension to 35,000 people caught out by a 2012 budget cash grab.

A Dáil vote will today call on ministers to reverse the austerity measure that left the pensioners, mostly women, up to €35 a week poorer.

And that call is echoed by a Fine Gael stalwart who brought the scandal to the fore. Eamon Tynan – nephew of War of Independence hero Seán Mac Eoin – told the Irish Daily Mail: ‘What’s happening is wrong, it’s immoral and there’s no excuse. Pay people what you owe them.’

Despite the growing calls, Social

Protection Minister Regina Doherty last night insisted the State pension scheme was ‘fairer than it’s ever been’.

Pensioners and Fianna Fáil want action to tackle the anomaly in pension payment bands, which affects those who took time out of work before 1994 or who worked part-time.

It also means they will not get the €5-a-week pension rise announced in last week’s Budget.

Last night, Fianna Fáil TD Willie O’Dea revealed he had been raising the anomaly issue with the Government since 2013.

‘The State forced women not to work,’ he said, referring to the former marriage bar that meant women had to leave their public sector jobs once they wed. ‘The same State that said you have to stop working once you’re married is now saying we have to reduce your pension because you didn’t work.’

He has brought a Dáil motion calling to end the controversial method of measuring pension entitlement that has seen the weekly payments to more than 23,000 women and 12,000 men cut by up to €35 a week.

The level of pension a person is entitled to be paid is calculated by dividing the total number of PRSI contributions – or ‘stamps’ – they paid by the number of years they were in work.

But an increased number of payment bands were introduced in 2012 as an austerity measure.

This had the effect of disadvantaging women who were forced to leave their jobs by the marriage bar or who left work to raise families. The anomaly was made worse as the Government gave an extra €5 to pensioners in the recent budget – apart from the tens of thousands of pensioners affected by the anomaly.

A vote on the motion is due to take place this morning, with the Government in line for defeat as Sinn Féin and other Opposition parties are expected to back Fianna Fáil.

Fine Gael has claimed the Government cannot afford the cost of reversing the changes to the contributions system. It is costing affected pensioners more than €1,500 a year each.

Yesterday, Social Protection Minister Regina Doherty warned that the State pensions scheme’s complex nature meant the anomaly could inadvertently result in other groups missing out.

Ms Doherty said: ‘In every complex system there are winners and losers and in this system there is an anomaly that disadvantages a very small number of people relative to the large number of pensioners that we have.

‘That’s not new and it has been recognised from as far back as 2010. In essence, it’s not fair to say that the current pension system that we have isn’t fair, as it’s the fairest it has been.

‘That’s notwithstanding that there are 40,000 people who, because of the averaging rules and the length of their working lives, are probably being treated unfairly compared to some other people.’

During a Dáil debate last night, Fianna Fáil social protection spokesman Mr O’Dea, who proposed the motion, said he had raised the issue with the Government repeatedly.

But there was ‘little to suggest that anything is being done about it, or that the Government wants to do anything about it’, he said.

Ms Doherty said that the women

‘Mainly women who left work’

affected are still receiving upwards of 85% of their pensions, putting them among the highest pension earners in Europe.

She added: ‘The real anomaly here is… that the person with the shorter contribution history does much better in this context than is actually justified.

‘Having said that I do agree with the position people have taken, and we all recognise that it’s mainly women who left work to take up caring responsibilities in these special cases.

‘We need to be very careful that the solution we use to address this issue doesn’t exacerbate any underlying inequity and impose any unnecessary or unjustifiable costs on our future workers.’

Retired teacher Eamon Tynan, who took Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe to task on the radio over the problem, said his wife Carol is losing out on €35 each week because of the 2012 changes.

He told the Irish Daily Mail the situation amounted to ‘State theft’ and was ‘wrong, immoral and totally inexcusable’ and urged the Government to ‘pay people what you owe them.’

Ms Doherty’s department has pledged to address the anomaly – which has disadvantaged tens of thousands of people – by 2020, but only for people entering the pensions scheme beyond that point. She said those efforts were being complicated by the fact that digital records of PRSI payments dated back only to 1984.

Ms Doherty said officials in her department have been trawling through a huge amount of paper records from earlier years to assess the scale of what they are facing. ‘Each of these paper records has to be gone through so that I can fix this and not create another anomaly,’ she added.

In a Dáil counter-motion last night, Ms Doherty called for a reasoned approach to resolving the issue through long-term pension reforms rather than the instant €70million fix called for by her Opposition counterpart Mr O’Dea.

Mr O’Dea’s motion has demanded the issue be resolved for new entrants to the pensions system in 2018 – but did not call for those affected so far to be reimbursed, a move which could cost an estimated €290million. He

argued the ‘solutions for the coming years’ could be worked out subsequently, but that resolving the gender discrimination issue was paramount. Resolving the anomaly was not considered by the Government in the run-up to the budget, and has since been deemed unaffordable.

Ms Doherty also provoked a row with Fianna Fáil yesterday when she accused the party – which supports the confidence-and-supply agreement underpinning the Fine Gael-led Government – of being untrustworthy.

Defending herself against claims that the pension reforms should have been in last week’s budget, Ms Doherty pointed the finger at Fianna Fáil over the anomaly.

She told RTÉ’s Morning Ireland: ‘Given that Fianna Fáil took credit for everything that was in the social Bill, you might ask them why they didn’t get what they asked for. I’ll leave it at that and people can make up their own minds.’

Ms Doherty also said: ‘Fianna Fáil can’t be trusted – they can’t be trusted with the economy or with the sincerity of what they are saying to people.’

Mr O’Dea demanded she withdraw the remarks, accusing her of ‘undermining’ the confidence-and-supply agreement between Fianna Fáil and the Government.

He said: ‘I resent Regina Doherty’s remarks that Fianna Fáil can’t be trusted. Fianna Fáil has adhered faithfully to the confidence-and-supply agreement for the past 18 months, often in the face of opposition and upset from our supporters, who would prefer if we simply brought down the Government.

‘We’ve taken stick, we’ve suffered unpopularity, because we have stuck to our word. I think it ill-behoves a minister who is a beneficiary of that to make a statement like that.’