OLDER PEOPLE looking forward to a secure retirement found their savings were massively reduced because of the irresponsible attitude of “the very pillars of society”, President Michael D Higgins has said.
He said he was struck by the impact on older people when resources were “fired” at a speculative model of the economy.
“They were people who were looking forward to a period of their lives free from insecurity, free from distress, and suddenly found that their pension investments – if they had taken redundancy sums, or if they had saved sums – were suddenly massively reduced, not through any action of their own but through the quite irresponsible attitude of those who were speculating with other people’s resources,” Mr Higgins said.
He said “incredible mistakes” could happen when older people’s wisdom and their vital critical capacity was ignored. “We must all guard in future against any possible restoration of that kind of uncritical quietude that people succumbed to and that allowed these breaches of trust to take place.”
Mr Higgins was speaking at Active Retirement Ireland’s agm in Dublin yesterday. He told the gathering of more than 550 people that growing older was not a prescription for becoming silent. “Far, far from it”.
There was no such thing as retirement from citizenship, he added. “People are creative until they take their last breath.”
He also urged an end to ageism against young and old. “It’s something that works against every concept of active citizenship and creative society, and the kind of republic that I’ve been speaking about over the last year and a half as I travelled throughout the country,” he said.
Active Retirement Ireland’s chief executive Maureen Kavanagh said policy makers must wake up to the changing face of Ireland’s retired population. The tendency to depict retired people as being “elderly, frail and dependent on others for support” was outdated.
“We now have people retiring at a relatively young age. Lots of those who have retired in recent months have yet to reach their 60th birthdays.” She said people were retiring with higher levels of education and experience than ever before. “We also have the first generation of women retiring who were unaffected by the marriage ban. So a lot of women retiring today have long and illustrious careers behind them.”
Ms Kavanagh said a national positive ageing strategy had been promised some time ago but had yet to be delivered. “It must take account of how this age-group has changed and set out policies aimed at making Ireland a truly age-friendly society,” she said.
