Saturday 3rd February 2018: 1.24am. Link shared: http://www.welfare.ie/en/pressoffice/Pages/pr230118.aspx
Under the new Irish state pension they just announced last week, everybody retiring after 2020 needs to have worked 2,080 weeks (40 years) to receive a full state pension, with it pro rata reduced accordingly. Big change over the old system where the last ten years before retirement was what mattered. Me, I've worked a total 253 weeks in Ireland in my life to date. So I currently get 12% of the state pension, which is €28/week. Now, what annoys me is that if I work continuously until age 68 which is currently when it pays out for my age cohort, I cannot under any circumstances get more than 82% of the state pension no matter what I do. And that makes me pretty annoyed. I appreciate their difficulty, not enough being paid in and too many living too long, but that kind of unfairness drives people into the hard right of politics. Lots and lots of young people were put out of employment by the 2009 crash, and now they're going to get shafted in the state pension no matter what they do. I think the government needs to think again on these reforms, 40 years is too much. 30 years sounds much more reasonable, allows people to have been out of the country for a few years and so on. You know, like we all had to do, which was to emigrate for a while.