Auto enrollment pensions

I didn't say they weren't. My initial response was to a specific post on a persons priorities in their younger years.

I understand that.

The idea that Irish people don't save doesn't really hold up. There's over €160bn of Irish household savings deposited in banks.

Our problem isn't the lack of savings. The issue is that only 1% of the amount held on deposit is invested in securities like stocks, ETF's, etc, an amount well below the European average of 10%. Deemed disposal and the 38% exit tax are major disincentives for Irish people to invest more of their assets rather than leaving savings on deposit with a negative real return.

For years people have tried to push for change, so far the government has resisted reform. Pascal Donohue in particular is doing all in his power to block and delay any meaningful change in this area.

The “state” is politicians who are petrified of older voters. The state pension will never be reduced. Not a single party would commit to that

I don’t know if it will or not. The “time bomb” is when we get to a stage when pensioners are still paying private rent instead of owning a house (or living in council housing)

The only thing I’d be certain of is that politicians are too afraid to cut the contributory pension.

the state pension is not paid out of current tax revenue

Public sector pensions are paid for by a combination of revenues, including the ASC that public servants pay.

Considering how poor the single scheme is for all recent recruits, I don’t think they’ll be changing that too much

Not to mention that when they are pleading with people to plan for retirement, reducing the benefits for any group to do so is not going to happen

The State Pension Contributory is paid out of PRSI receipts.

The non-con State Pension is financed by taxes.

I'm not sure if it's justified or not, but there's a gap in what we're being told.

It's being said repeatedly that this scheme will help mitigate the "pensions timebomb" ("In the more immediate future, the Government will be judged on how the rollout of the scheme is handled, as it takes a major step towards trying to defuse our looming pensions timebomb", https://www.rte.ie/news/2025/1116/1544026-auto-enrolment-pensions/ )

It's not being explained how a scheme that requires the state to provide topups to employees' pension funds will help to achieve this. The only way it could do so is by creating future savings for the state.

I don't see savings coming from future public sector pensions - AFAIK these pensions are defined in a way that a person's pension income is calculated to be an amount inclusive of the state contributory pension. So regardless of how the state pension is reduced or increased, the pensioner's net income remains the same. It would take a brave government to change this for existing PS employees, and we don't have brave governments.

I can't imagine the non-contributory pension being reduced in any significant way, either through an explicit reduction or implicitly through non-indexation. It would be seen as right-wing.

So what does that leave? I can imagine a "pragmatic" approach where private-sector pensioners with their own pension arrangements get fewer state benefits/contributory pension. Not entirely removed - they would be left somewhat better off than if they had no private pension funds, but they would not receive the full state pension and benefits like pensioners with private arrangements do today. So this auto-enrolment scheme would facilitate state benefits being replaced by funding from employees and employers.

That's all speculation, but in the absence of information from the government, it's what I'd anticipate.

Conditions were changed for recruits to the public service in fairness. The single scheme is nowhere near the value of what was on offer to those who came before (with the pre 1995 people having the best of all)

I know this is different to entitlements as you say, but I think some people believe that most public servants still have a “golden” pension and it’s not really the case anymore. Someone who ends up on a salary of 60k would have an occupational pension of less than 15k a year if they started since 2013 (and they’ve contributed quite a bit to that in their pension and ASC deductions over their 40 years of service)

Fair point.