Dear Brian,
Are your advisors nuts? It’s already proven that runaway public sector pay hit insane levels during the tenure of last Government. Like for like pay is at least 25% more than in the private sector. But switch to pensions and the contrast goes off the chart. That’s why talk among your civil servants of hitting private pensions, now that the ship of State is holed, threatens to take life jackets off passengers in steerage to give extra buoyancy to fellow guests in first class;

• Civil Servants, Teachers, Garda and High Court judges have pension pots that would require career-long contributions of 27%, 31%, 48% and 87% per annum respectively. The average contribution rate in the private sector is 11%. It’s not higher because people don’t have the money.
• Any worker retiring in the public sector on a salary at retirement of €60,000 has a pension pot worth over €1 million but 40% of the private work force have none and most that do have one that is wholly inadequate. This is retirement apartheid, plain and simple.
• Those that have none can’t afford them regardless of tax incentives. Those that do can’t afford to put in more. Now you cut tax relief and guess what happens next – you’ll swell the retirement ghetto.
• Public sector pension pots that pay 150% tax free cash and 50% pensions are worth between 15 and 18 times the salary paid at retirement. How many private pensions do you reckon will ever come with an asses roar of these staggering numbers? Just who do you think will be the comfortably retired in the future and who, having paid for it, will be writing begging letters to relatives?
• Private pensions are hugely exposed to investment losses and the unaffordable cost of buying a pension. Nobody in the public sector is because we, taxpayers, guarantee them and pay for most of them.
• We are already paying €2.3 billion in pensions to retired public sector workers but what’s building up on the clock in the background is a further €5.4 billion per year. That’s excluding the €1.7 billion that goes into the National Pension Reserve Fund.
• Do the math and the total capitalised value of the public sector pensions bill is running at €60 billion over the years ahead.
• In the private sector 90% of employers who are trying to guarantee pensions to their staff have schemes that are underfunded and are in deficit, meanwhile €1.2 billion of deficits from state agencies have already been transferred into the public sector pot. FAS was one such scheme, transferring with a €216 million black hole. 
  Minister, that’s why talk of slashing into private pensions will set fire to the smouldering anger already in the private sector. Whatever way you do it, you’ll simply make things worse;
• You cut tax relief on contributions and you’ll destroy the incentive to save. People aren’t stupid -why get reduced tax relief on the way in to be mugged by the full force of income tax on the way out.
• You tax lump sums at retirement today and you’ll be kicking people in the teeth – remember their retirement lump sums are already down 40% while those in the Public Sector are rising with increments.

There’s a simple principle to follow. Sort out the Public Sector first. Cut pay instead of social welfare and reform pensions. Equalise treatment and you come back to the private sector with your scalpel in clean hands. Do it any other way and you’ll destroy this window to make fair what has become unfair, to treat workers in both public and private sectors equally and to restore power to the Oireachtas.