Plans to raise the retirement age are in doubt today.
The Oireachtas Committee on Social Welfare has opposed plans to incrementally increase the age at which you can claim the state pension up to 68.
There's concern that within the next two decades there won't be enough workers to adequately fund the state pension.
But Committee Chair Denis Naughton says they spent a number of months assessing four proposals from the Pensions Commission, and felt the one suggesting an increase in the retirement age was not appropriate:
"And we feel that it tied the hands of the committee in terms of looking at things outside of the very tight confines of the state pension. And we're recommending that the Commission package at three which looks at PRSI rates, and extract a contribution should be the approach that should be taken, which as a result of that would not include a rise in the pension age."
However former member of the Pensions Commission, John McGrane, believes the committee's recommendation will walk us into a pensions crisis:
"We will have 20% more people that's another million pensioners in 2050, just barely barely 20 years away. And the pension age is a sensitive issue, of course, politically, but the reality is that the pension age would not increase from 66 to 67 for almost another, almost another 10 years and more people, ensuring that our successors, our children have a pension at all, because at the rate we're going to want."
