Regina’s plan raises questions over trust

THE Minister for Social Protection, Regina Doherty, is better known for delivering gaffes than grand plans for securing the nation’s financial future. So it was with some surprise that she announced this week her grand political project: a mandatory pension project for a million Irish workers.

Ms Doherty will, you would think, have a keen sense that other Fine Gael ministers delivered a double whammy of announced major projects – Irish Water and universal health insurance – which turned out to be monumental fiascos.

Soon pension experts will tell us whether or not Ms Doherty’s project is truly innovative – or just an old pension plan with an updated narrative and a fancy meme.

But her proposal means increasing income tax by 6% for squeezed middle earners – although she will try to disguise the tax hike as a self-help measure.

And how employers react when their contribution to the plan digs deep into profits and payroll costs soar?

And Ms Doherty’s proposal is looking at halving the tax relief on the contributions paid by workers with private pensions even though they tax their pensions when they mature.

I wish Godspeed to the Minister for Social Protection and her officials proposing the mandatory pension plan. But I cannot ignore this: Regina Doherty and her team all have those gilt-edged public service pensions that are the envy of taxpayers who finance them.

Yet everyone should rejoice when the Government confronts the pension crisis wrought by the fact that 65% of workers in the private sector make no pension provision.

Still, the absence of detail in the minister’s choreographed launch reminded me of Saint Augustine’s prayer: ‘Lord make me chaste but not yet.’

Choosing to introduce her pension plan in the dog days of August when the nation is consumed by the Pope’s visit is one way to avoid answering awkward questions and giving precise answers.

And delaying its implementation until 2022 puts her mandatory pension project on the long finger – out of sight and out of mind, to a time when Minister Doherty has moved on, she hopes, to bigger and better things.

IT is a natural law of politics that the minister who launches a major policy or project is rarely in office to supervise its implementation; they get the glory of a launch but miss any comeback from a failure. And by 2022, Ms Doherty will be long gone from supervising mandatory pensions.

This column is a sad, even cynical take on modern government but it is hewn from hearing ministers’ pension plans over the past generation.

The pensions business is based on trust: prospective pensioners pay in money for decades, expect it to be wisely invested and delivered back with interest in their ‘golden years’. But trust is a devalued currency in Ireland, particularly in public life and institutions.

Governments and politicians of all parties and none were shown to be corrupt and incompetent in and out of tribunals of inquiry.

Michael Noonan, when he was Minister for Finance, broke the trust of private pensioners when he skimmed off their pensions. And, of course, banks cannot be trusted.

So beware trusting anyone with this mandatory pension plan.

THE Pope’s visit to the Republic made the most commonly used sectarian slogan in Northern Ireland more topical if no less ugly. ‘F*** the Pope’ is a loyalist classic: crude but its minimalism gives it maximum impact. A friend points out that it is not so easy for Catholic bigots to reciprocate with a curse on the leader of the Presbyterians, the largest Protestant denomination. My pal in Belfast says: ‘The most direct and correct response to FTP is F*** The Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland. Quite a mouthful after a skip full of drink…’ WELL-heeled Ranelagh is threatened with division at Dunville Avenue with plans to build either an underpass or a bridge over the Luas track. No issue is consuming Ranelagh more than the plan that many see as a waste of money. So I am heartened to see one professional back his loyalty to a potentially sundered Ranelagh with real money. Beechwood Vets opened its doors last week behind Morton’s supermarket.