THE time given by mothers to their children in the 1970s and 1980s laid the ground for the Celtic Tiger" nature of the Irish economy today, according to Dr Tony Fahey of the ESRI.
Women working in the home had invested in this economic success, and were therefore entitled to benefit from it in the form of pensions in their maturity.
Dr Fahey was speaking at a plenary session of the National Economic and Social Forum yesterday, held to discuss pension policy, enterprise and jobs. He said that, according to an ESRI study, dependency levels in Ireland were set to fall in the long term, which represented a great opportunity for social reform.
"Before pensions were invented your children were your pension," he said. "The transfer of resources from adult children to parents has virtually ceased. But in a structural sense it is still true. The real pension fund we have is the large cohort of young people coming out of our schools."
He said he had a problem with the categorisation of women working in the home as "dependents". There were two components to the qualities acquired by children. One was education and the other was their mothers time. "Their children are their pension and they are entitled to draw on it. They can only do that through the State pension," he said. "The State, unlike a private pension fund, has the mechanism to invest in education and take back that investment in taxation."
Earlier, he said Ireland stood out in the western world for its high proportion of single elderly people. This had implications for the social support system for the elderly. "Those who have family in Ireland have social support. But there is a high proportion with no family."
This had arisen because of the uniquely low marriage rate in Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s, so that today one in four elderly men and one in five elderly women were single, some of them living with siblings. In the US in the 1980s the divorced and never married together amounted to only to per cent of the population.