Active Retirement Ireland, the country’s largest membership organisation for older people, is calling on the government to be fair and accurate in the way figures around older people’s income supports are presented, following yesterday’s publication of the latest Tax Strategy Group (TSG) papers.
The charity says the government’s framing of people in receipt of social welfare in terms of their cost to society in the lead up to Budget 2025 is disingenuous, deliberately divisive and belittles people such as older people who rely solely on the state pension for their weekly income.
Active Retirement Ireland CEO Maureen Kavanagh said: “The TSG paper on social protection expenditure opens with the importance of viewing this expenditure as an investment and not just as a cost, and then goes on to literally itemise the monetary cost to society if just €1 per week is added to main social welfare payments.
“This is completely disingenuous and more of the same distraction tactics by the government when it comes to providing older people in Ireland basic pension adequacy and income security.
“The facts are that the current rate of the full contributory state pension is just 28.6% of average earnings. This is despite the €12 increase to the pension in the last budget which only barely managed to keep the dismal buying power of the pension from falling even lower. While welcomed, the government can hardly expect a clap on the back for this when you consider where older people would be if the so-called increase had been any less than €12.
“It is also a fact that in 2018 the government committed to a state pension of 34% of average earnings, benchmarked so that it would rise automatically in line with wage growth and older people would stop being left behind year after year.
“Despite repeated calls from Active Retirement Ireland and our partners in the Pension Promise Coalition, this commitment remains unmet and we have a state pension that, by the government’s own assessed baseline of basic pension adequacy, is at current rates at least €52 a week short.
“Similarly, our call for the government to reinstate the Fuel Allowance payment to 32 weeks, following its reduction to 28 weeks, is a call for this essential support to be restored to what is was previously, not for the government to make provision for additional weeks.
“Every year at Budget time we hear this negative and totally unfair language around the pension and Ireland’s ageing population and it is led by the government.
“This is a trope as old as time in Ireland and older people should not have to endure being constantly presented as a burden or cost to society but instead have their contributions recognised and valued, and their right to basic pension adequacy respected.”
