I have no real problem with this section. It is appropriate that a pension should be provided for somebody who has done the State a great service. I am glad the Minister of State is in attendance. I do not believe the provisions of the section should be confined as they are because there are other parallel anomalies in the system which the Bill could have addressed. Some of them concern women who were subjected to the marriage bar, an analogous case to the matter addressed in this Bill, particularly this section.
The Minister of State stated in her Second Stage speech that many judges did not take up the bench until relatively late in their careers and, as a matter of justice, this should be looked at.
I received a letter, for example, from a woman in Galway, which states:
I am one of those women who on marrying in 1956 was compelled to resign my job.
Now that I'm in my seventhieth year and after rearing my children and later my grandchildren, it would be heartening to receive a pension all for myself and feel independent of my husband and his pension with the few extra pounds thrown in for me as if I am just an afterthought.
That is exactly the same situation which we are addressing in this section, and I wonder if the Minister could give an indication that this kind of an anomaly would be resolved at some stage because it is directly parallel.
I received another letter from a woman which states:
I worked for the E.S.B. for a few years prior to my marriage in October 1957 when I had to resign due to the marriage bar and also to look after my eight children. I will be celebrating my sixty-sixth birthday this month with the knowledge that I am not entitled to any pension, which I think is grossly unfair, unjust and not in line with Mr. McCreevy's law of individualisation.
A third letter I received states:
When I got married in 1958, women had to give up their jobs, ‘the marriage bar'; we were denied our basic right to work. When our children were grown up and it was possible for married women to be employed we encountered the ‘age-bar', further discrimination. Ireland joining the EU put an end to institutionalized discrimination for women, our laws changed to reflect this. It hardly seems credible that in 1999 any law, scheme or service could exist which effectively discriminates against any section of the population. However, institutional discrimination still exists against older women. Having endured the ‘marriage bar', and the ‘age bar', we are now facing the ‘pension bar'.
That is exactly what was happening in the case just described.
