Talk to most ordinary people about pensions and their eyes glaze over. Talk to Anne Maher, the chief executive of the Pensions Board and her eyes light up. Pensions - setting them up and their funding, management and trusteeship - have been a part of her life since she took her first job at Phoenix Insurance in London after leaving the National University with a civil law degree.

It was an unusual career for an Irish country girl in the 1960s, she says, but she now has the most enviable job - for a pension practitioner - of producing the Report of the National Pensions Initiative. It is expected to be the most radical document on pension reform in the history of the State.

"This is a good time to be doing this job," she says, smiling broadly in the Pension Board's office on Holles Street.

"We are in a unique position as a nation to do something right now about the future of our pensions. Other countries envy our lack of baggage - such as too much or poor regulation. Our demographics are favourable and finally, we're launching this major initiative against the background of the Celtic Tiger. I couldn't have taken over this job at a better time."

The chief executive's post came up last year after she had just turned 50. She had spent 26 years with Irish Life where she had risen to be an associate director of Corporate Business and the director and secretary of Irish Life Trustee Services.

It was a turning point in her career, she says. Having been a director of the Pensions Board for its first five years she knew that running the agency would offer a new challenge in a field in which she was an acknowledged leader.

The board was set up in 1991 to act as both a regulator and supervisor of occupational pension schemes and as policy adviser to the Government on pension policy and development.

The first five years were devoted mainly to putting systems in place to ensure that everyone involved in an occupational scheme - the employer, the members, the trustees - was aware of their rights and responsibilities. The board has become both nursemaid and policeman to the industry.

Since 1991, it has encouraged hundreds of companies to implement best pension practice, trained trustees and educated individual pension members. But sometimes more than encouragement can be required. There are usually about 50 cases under investigation at any time, but Ms Maher says the board only has to threaten court action to get the vast majority of company slackers and shirkers to adhere to the 1990 Pensions Act. Prosecutions are rarer still - the board only had to take one case to court in 1996. This it won.

The "whistle-blowing" amendment to the Act, brought in last year, which requires anyone associated with a pension scheme to come forward with any information about fraud or other irregularities or face possible fine or imprisonment "has been effective so far, with five cases to date, all of them genuine", she says.

"In each case the whistle-blower was a pension practitioner connected in some way with the scheme."

There was no regulation, and more fundamentally, no legal requirement for employers to ensure the funding of occupational pensions before the Act. Its presence has virtually ensured that the sort of huge pension scandals common in Britain are far less likely to happen here.

The drafters of the Act were also conscious of the danger of over-regulation, she says. "I'm asked to speak at pension conferences all over the world and one of the things that audiences always comment about later is how fair, clear and enforceable our system is." This is what the Pensions Board and the Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs were also aiming for when they decided, in tandem, to launch a National Pensions Initiative 18 months ago.

Every strand of the community - from the social partners and the pensions industry to local poverty agencies and religious bodies were invited to put forward their views on how retirement should be funded in the future. They were invited to meet at a day-long conference on July 1st at Dublin Castle where "democracy had its day out". From 140 proposals tabled, a new system will be recommended, says Ms Maher, suitable for a population that still enjoys a favourable weighting of working to retired people, but one which has already changed from a homogenous block of permanent, settled employees to a melting pot of full-time, part-time, contract and self-employed workers.

The report is due to be published in a few weeks and Ms Maher is a careful not to give clues to its content. But she says: "A few things came out loud and clear from the submissions, however. That there is a need to address the poverty issue. The initiative will have to aspire to making sufficient resources available to the old to allow them to live in dignity. The level of cover for part-time and temporary workers is also very low at just 10 per cent and atypical work is on the increase in this country. We need to find pensions solutions to these issues.

"And while large employers, whether Irish or multinational tend to provide private pension cover, employees of small firms are unlikely to have pensions. The extension of private pension coverage to the self-employed must also be an essential aspiration of the initiative."

She refuses to be drawn on whether pension provision should be compulsory or not, except to say that the favoured approach has always been to encourage companies and individuals to do the best thing by their employees or in their own best interest.

Over-regulation, she says generally, "can be very counterproductive. In terms of any new regulation we would always look at whether it is necessary to achieve our objective". She concedes that there will be an additional cost of providing a proper pension system, but that the State has never been in a better position to pay the bill.

The board and its team of independent advisers - led by Dr Peter Bacon - are under some time pressure to produce the report by the end of the year, but her job, she says is not stressful. "It is exciting and challenging and there is a steady sense of purpose to what we are doing."

She describes the board's working relationship with the Minister for Social, Community and Family Affairs as "very good" and believes the Government is firmly committed to reforming the system.

"This issue is important not just because people must have provisions made for their old age, but because occupational pension fund assets - £19.2 billion of which are under management - can influence the economic welfare of this country and underpins its growth path. I don't think you can consider the economy without taking into account the pension situation."

The next several weeks will be completely dominated by preparations for the launch of the report, she says, but Christmas will be spent on her farm. The elegant Chanel suits will be swopped for dungarees and green wellies as she and her husband Paddy abandon their city base for what she calls their "spiritual" home on her family farm near Clonmel. That farm, she says, like pensions "is my life".

Name: Anne Maher

Title: Chief Executive, The Pensions Board

Age: 52

Family: Married to consultant actuary Paddy Maher

Born: Clonmel, Co Tipperary

Education: Born in Clonmel, Co. Tipperary She went to Bennettschurch National School, became a boarder at the Ursuline Convent, St Mary's, Waterford and then did a law degree at the National University of Ireland.

Background: Former associate Director, Corporate Business, Irish Life plc; former Chairman of the Irish Association of Pension Funds

Interests: She and her husband are part-time farmers - as the only child she inherited her family farm near Clonmel in 1978.

Why is she in the news? In the next few weeks she will usher in the report of the National Pensions Initiative which should provide, which should set the way for the most far-ranging pension reform in the history of the State.