Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-09-23-Speech-2-289"
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"en.20030923.8.2-289"2
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"Mr President, the key point that Mr Andersson made in his contribution tonight is the need to get the social and financial concerns in balance. Clearly there is a need for both. It seems to me that one of the key issues here, at least in relation to poverty in old age, relates to women. All the statistics show that because of intermittent work, breaks in their employment record, family care commitments etc. they by and large end up in a poorer situation than men. Add to that the fact that they also survive longer than men, and the result is greater numbers of older women than men after a certain age.
There is a need for us to address the question of funding of pensions. As Mr Crowley has mentioned, in Ireland we have introduced a reserve fund where 1% of GDP is set aside each year, and there are some billions in this fund now; in fact there is so much money in it that people are beginning to fight over how and where it should be invested. Nevertheless it is an attempt to ensure that there is a fund there for the future.
We are fortunate in that we have a demographic lag of about 20 to 25 years, so that the bulge that is hitting the rest of Europe at the moment will not hit Ireland for some time yet. Nevertheless we expect it will arrive.
Another attempt to deal with this issue is the introduction of personal retirement savings accounts, where individuals, with the assistance of their employer, can open an account and put money in it which will provide some pension funding for them at a certain point. The difficulty is that the financial institutions which are given responsibility for selling these products are in many cases resisting them because they cannot make enough money out of the categories of people that they are aimed at, mainly the lower income section of the workforce. There is a need to address that issue.
The point I am making here is that there is no need for us to be unduly pessimistic providing we make the policy choices now about what we are going to face in the future. It is not enough for us to wring our hands, it is not enough for Member States, as Mr Hughes has pointed out, to oppose the temporary agency workers directive – which provides some degree of security for certain categories of workers – and then pretend that they are going to do something serious about pensions, when in fact they are undermining the possibility for many thousands of people to have sufficient contributions, even for a State pension.
To conclude, there really is a need for some joined-up thinking in this area."@en1
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