Pension reform - Crisis can’t be kicked down road

TALKING about pension reform in the week international investors — they were called carpetbaggers in America’s southern states after their civil war — were invited to throw their eye over the family farm may seem incongruous but this is the very long-fingering that has our pension arrangements in such terrible and frightening disarray.

Yesterday the Central Statistics Office published figures that represent another sad epiphany of our economic collapse. They showed that workers, especially self-employed workers, were pulling back on investing in pension schemes because they could not afford to continue making contributions.

The disastrous performance of many pension schemes over recent years must have had a negative influence too. Either way the statistics remind us that we are facing a pensions crisis — unless you’re a “retiring” executive in one of our “pillar” banks of course.