Social Welfare and Automatic Enrolment Retirement Savings System (Amendment) Bill 2025: Second Stage Dail Éireann — 2025-11-12 ============================================================ Dara Calleary (FF), Mayo We are having that impact. We are also looking at a pay-related approach in a number of other areas. The increases in PRSI that are contained in the PRSI roadmap are to address the future sustainability of the Social Insurance Fund, as well as pay-related benefit schemes. I remind the House that we are paying up to €450 per week to recipients under this scheme, which is €200 more than jobseekers' payments. I recognise that many Deputies raised the cost of disability. We are committed in the programme for Government to introducing a permanent and annual cost-of-disability support payment. We have started the work on that not only within our Department but through the Taoiseach's Department, the disability programme office and the Cabinet committee on disability. We have set up within our Department a strategic, focused network on the cost of disability and have begun our engagements with the disability groups as to what a cost-of-disability payment might look like, who should get it and the various issues that need to go into it. I have asked my officials to have that work completed ahead of next year's budget. It is complex and there is a lot of work involved in it, but I am confident that I will be in a position to bring a proposal to the Government ahead of next year's budget. Deputy O'Reilly and, I think, virtually every other Deputy raised the carer's allowance. The full cost of abolishing the means test for the carer's allowance is €600 million. We will deliver that over the lifetime of this Government. From next July, a household on an income of €104,000 will be able to claim a full social welfare payment for carer's allowance. That is the first time that level of income can qualify for a social welfare payment. We will closely monitor the inflows arising because many people may make a decision now to seek carer's allowance. I may have a chance to discuss this again in the morning and in committee in detail next week on Committee Stage. I have dealt with child poverty. To respond to Deputy Hayes, the ESRI in its post-budget analysis stated that there will be a decrease in the rate of child poverty as a consequence of the budget measures, in particular the child support payment. That will not come through for another two years in terms of the figures being measured, but I think it pretty much will show that. Deputy Healy spoke of the cliff edge for people with disabilities who lose secondary benefits, as did Deputy Boyd Barrett. It is good to have the latter back in the Chamber and to see him in fighting form. In budget 2026 we ensured that those with disabilities can retain their fuel allowance payment for five years after taking up work. We have also extended the back-to-work family dividend to people on disability allowance in order that they can keep their child support payment for up to four children for a full year and 50% for the second year. Deputy Stanley raised quite a number of issues around auto-enrolment, which I will move on to now. There has been a lot of debate about auto-enrolment in this House over recent years. With the greatest of respect, while Deputies come in and say they know nothing about it, there have been many opportunities to discuss it and to share the information. In particular, since I have come into office, I have provided briefings, audiovisual room hearings and updates on it. As regards the specific areas, Deputy O'Reilly raised the issue in relation to the NTMA. There are a number of reasons the NTMA is not the best institution to manage retirement savings funds through the automatic enrolment system. First, the NTMA manages State money. It does not, in our opinion, have the systems, the knowledge or the processes to manage up to 750,000 individual savings. This is a key part of auto-enrolment. It is not State money; it is the money of everybody who has enrolled. That is one thing. The NTMA does not have the skills to do that. Second, we wanted a dedicated expert function through NAERSA to manage AE and to give confidence to people whose future is dependent on the success of it. NAERSA is making the independent choices in that regard. The NTMA also reports to different Departments. In terms of efficiency, it is important that NAERSA reports to my Department. The NTMA invests State money in the international stock market. It uses commercial investment managers from private industry to do that, which is what NAERSA will do with people's retirement savings. I welcome Deputy Hayes's acknowledgement of the increased supervision within the Bill. In relation to the funding for community and voluntary groups, my Department has been quite proactive in advising other Departments, including the Department of Public Expenditure, Infrastructure, Public Service Reform and Digitalisation, about this issue throughout 2025 and about all the money that is necessary. We have also engaged with employers and have had extensive engagement across the system in relation to automatic enrolment since our straw man public consultation in 2018. We have made every effort over recent years to ensure that people knew that this was due to be enacted. It was due to be enacted from September of this year, and there was quite a lot of coverage earlier this year when we extended it to January. There has therefore been a substantial lead-in period. It is not just for the community and voluntary groups; it is for businesses small and large. We stacked the contributions deliberately to assist people, not just savers but also businesses, in stepping it up such that it is a phased in approach and they can prepare further contributions. We will continue on the basis of this evening's debate to remind my colleagues in the Government - I will do so formally again - of the fact that we will start this on 1 January and that they should make provision for it and should make information available. In relation to Deputy O'Donoghue's point about older people in automatic enrolment, the system has been designed to be simple and for people to understand it. Every €3 a person puts in, the employer puts in another €3 and the State tops up by €1, so that €3 becomes €7. It is a significant carrot. Your €3 becomes €7 regardless of your age. I once again emphasise the point that the contributory pension and the non-contributory pension remain as the bedrock of our State pension system. For somebody who is on the average industrial wage, which is around €46,000 at the moment, when you drop to €16,000, it is a huge drop for the 750,000 to 800,000 people who have no other plans in place. Auto-enrolment will not make up the entire gap; it will make up a significant gap and make a big difference. In terms of the assessments of AE, we have published a macro and a microeconomic assessment, the SME test around automatic enrolment and the poverty test around automatic enrolment. I am not sure whether it was a mistake on Deputy Hayes's part but he mentioned that an employee could be down €300 to €1,200 a month after being enrolled in My Future Fund. I do not think so. --- 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/2025-11-12/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-21T01:01:05+00:00 Sitting date: 2025-11-12