Sir, – The Department of Finance is saying that we must increase the State pension age to 68 by 2028 or, by 2050 the annual cost of age-related expenditure – pensions, healthcare, long-term care – is set to jump more than fourfold, costing €17 billion more, in today’s terms, than in 2019.
This is based on increases in life expectancy predicted in Eurostat tables for Ireland.
Whatever about the outcome for the notoriously ever-longer living Mediterranean peoples, we are living like Anglo-Americans. Life expectancy in the US started declining in 2014 and in the UK in 2016.
Unless the department develops cures for the causes of this decline (obesity, dementia and diabetes) we cannot assume our fate will be any different.
In its submission to the Pensions Commission, the department included a suggestion that the pension age be linked to actual increases in life expectancy. A suitable formula, embedded in legislation, would allow our politicians off the hook and would protect us from overshooting, should our life expectancy decline.
– Yours, etc,
PAUL CRONIN,
Mulgannon,
Wexford.