Pension Provisions Dail Éireann — 2023-12-07 ============================================================ Bernard Durkan (FG), Kildare North I welcome all of those measures. It is a tremendous budget for social welfare recipients and many others. All those improvements were admirable and necessary. However, there is a constitutional principle in this regard. People are paying into a system in anticipation of receiving a pension from it at a later stage but they do not qualify when the time comes. There is a constitutional commitment that does not arise as far as they are concerned. As the Minister of State said, it is usual that they would qualify for a non-contributory pension but there are many who do not. The few are the ones we should deal with now. It will not cost a lot. In any event, these people paid contributions but they were insufficient in number to qualify for the pension. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2023-12-07/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:52:30+00:00 Sitting date: 2023-12-07