Sir, – Your editorial (January 7th) rightly brings further attention to the current gargantuan pension crisis, which will dwarf the banking crisis in terms of scale over the coming years. As you point out, the Government has added to the problem by introducing a poorly thought-out levy and misappropriating State funds from the National Pensions Reserve Fund to aid zombie banks. The editorial is wrong, however, to contextualise the problem in terms of another invented public sector versus private sector battle. The ESB defined benefit pension scheme is the biggest such scheme in the State and relates to 13,500 State employees and retirees. The scheme suffers and has to cope with all the market challenges and regulatory inequalities that all other defined benefit schemes are faced with, but on a bigger scale.
Hopefully Minister for Social Protection Burton will soon bring some regulatory relief and common sense to these issues, but in the meantime less of the public versus private nonsense, please. – Yours, etc,