IAPF Spring 2018 Irish Pensions Magazine

42 | IRISH PENSIONS MAGAZINE | SPRING 2018 ANNUAL DINNER community, approach our duties to pension savers with a significant amount of good will and good faith. Next I will discuss policy. Our own policy as I have said is to be a clearing house for good practice in managing pension schemes. With this in mind we have been proactive on a number of fronts in the past year. We are a founding member of the SIF Ireland (Sustainable and Responsible Investment Forum Ireland) which was established last year as a national platform to advance responsible investment practices across all asset classes. At the same time, our investment committee, led by John Griffith, has been forensically examining ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) Factors – and how they should be part of a pension scheme’s investment processes. In part, this is in preparation for the bringing into force of the IORPs II or Second Pensions Directive, which will require Irish pension schemes to include consideration of ESG factors as part of the investment and risk management elements of their governance process. You will see some of the output of that work in our investment conference next month. Ireland, various iterations of a debt on employer or other protective regime for defined benefit schemes have been debated by the Oireachtas for over a year now, without this precipitating a rush to the exits by Irish employers. We do not endorse this as a good way to have dealt with this issue. In fact, it could be seen as the worst way in which one could go about protecting our remaining defined benefit schemes. However it has not led to a catastrophic result and I would put that down not only to legal restrictions within individual trust deeds but also to the social cohesion and good faith that exists within the pension community in Ireland. By no means is everything that either trustees or providers do in Ireland perfect, and there are many opportunities for further improvement, but I think it is important tonight to take a moment to celebrate that we do, as a pension Caitríona Perry, RTÉ and Peter Fahy, IAPF Chairperson