Social Welfare and Automatic Enrolment Retirement Savings System (Amendment) Bill 2025: Second Stage
Seanad Éireann — 2025-12-10
============================================================

Gerard P. Craughwell (IND), Labour Panel

I welcome the Minister to the House. I congratulate him on his first social welfare Bill. I am not going to knock any of it; there are plenty of people here to do that. There are a couple of things I would like to bring to the Minister's attention, first and foremost, the voluntary contributions with respect to social welfare. A person needing to make voluntary contributions under class S needs to pay €500 per annum, or thereabouts, while a person under class A has to pay €5,000 per annum. There is very little difference in the benefits that accrue from class A or class S. It is something I would ask the Minister to look into.
There is another point that I would like to bring to the Minister's attention. He might be aware that people who worked in the UK were given the opportunity to buy back years in the UK at a very discounted rate. There are people who worked in Ireland now living in the UK. It is only fair that we have a reciprocal arrangement to allow them to avail of buyback years for their pensions. In many cases, workers in both Ireland and the UK would have travelled over and back between the two islands. Some of those people are now impoverished. It might be something worth looking at. I am sure there is not a very large number of them there. It would be to the benefit of the country from the point of view of a proud, sovereign country looking after those who helped to build the economy we live in.
My next point concerns the training fund. Some 1% the employers’ contribution goes into the training fund. I am not sure where the money in the training fund has gone over the years. I ask the Minister to bring to the Cabinet a little idea that I have for that. Given the world we are now living in, the greatest threat in the world right now to the ordinary individual in the street and the corporate entity is the threat from cybersecurity and the misuse of artificial intelligence. I wonder if we could roll out a national training programme for every citizen in the State, and make that training fund actually benefit the economy.
The idea of having our citizens ignorant in the area of cybersecurity is detrimental to us all. We were recently talking to some people in a particular organisation, and the username and password for the computer were under the keyboard. They were very security conscious. Another branch of the same organisation had the username and password on the side of the monitor. If we could use some of this money to roll out a robust cybersecurity training programme, it would be marvellous. We could run it through the ETBs. It would put the Minister in the same guise as Donogh O'Malley many years ago. I ask that he bring it to the Cabinet.
There are other things I would like to see. The €10 is not great really for old age pensioners. We are a very wealthy country and we could have done a lot better there. When one gets to my vintage, one starts to think and look at those things very carefully. There are a lot of elderly people out there who are struggling. I appreciate everything knocks on from one thing to the other, but perhaps we could look at other ways of assisting the elderly with some sort of supplementary payment at some stage. Other than that, I congratulate the Minister on his first social welfare Bill and wish him very well as he goes forward.

---

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/seanad/2025-12-10/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:26+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-12-10