On Monday, the CSO published fresh estimates of the proportion of Irish workers belonging to pension schemes. The estimates provided shocking evidence of the devastation wrought by the crash on workers' retirement savings and the huge potential liability confronting the Exchequer.
The raw figures are bad enough. The proportion of Irish workers aged between 20 and 69 who are members of any kind of pension scheme fell from 51.2pc in October 2009 to 46.7pc in October 2015.
Look closer. The situation is even worse.
There were 1.945 million people aged 20 or over working in the Irish economy in the fourth quarter of 2015. Of these workers, 327,000 were employed in the public sector and a further 53,000 in the semi-states, a total of 380,000. It seems a reasonable assumption that most if not all these workers belong to pension schemes.
When public sector and semi-state workers are excluded, the proportion of private sector workers belonging to any sort of pension scheme falls to just 33pc, less than a third of the total. This compares to the 37pc of private sector workers who were members of pension schemes in October 2009.
Not alone has the proportion of private sector workers covered by pension schemes fallen even further since 2009, the quality of the pension coverage, even among those private sector workers who still belong to pension schemes, has also deteriorated.
