But Brennan's grand plan risks being strangled at birth. Employers say labour costs are bloated enough without adding another tax on jobs. The Department of Finance has balked at the 3bn cost to the state coffers. Trade unions are backing compulsory pensions but one wonders if workers share their enthusiasm for being forced to save for retirement.

As the row degenerates into a struggle over who pays what, many of the really important issues are being pushed to the sidelines. For example, if we are to have mandatory pensions, who should get the job of managing the money and how much should they be paid for doing it?

The local fund management industry is obviously a strong contender and its well-paid money managers must be licking their lips at the thought of adding all that new cash from compulsory pension-saving to the 230bn that they already manage for clients at home and abroad.

But their skills at managing money have often been called into question, with a growing fear that performance is flattered by a dangerous over-reliance on Irish equities. These have paid off handsomely in recent years as the Iseq beat the socks off many global stock markets. But betting a big slice of your pension on a handful of local blue-chips, many of which risk getting hammered if the property market runs into trouble, may not be the wisest strategy.

Indeed, many people are beginning to question why we need fund managers at all, given that none of them has a consistent record in beating the market.

According to investment consultants Hewitt, many of the Irish managers are struggling just to keep pace with the markets.

Hewitt has come up with an objective measure that it uses to benchmark the performance of all Irish asset managers, using a composite index that captures the performance of all the different markets and asset classes in which they invest our money. The exercise does money men few favours.

Over any time horizon you care to mention . . . one year, three years, five years or ten years . . . the average performance of Irish fund managers has failed to match the index. So instead of handing over your pension savings to the experts, you would have been better off using the money to buy a simple index tracker that blindly mimics the performance of world stock markets, making no attempt to weed out the losers from the winners.

Of course, some managers did manage to beat the index on occasion but there was no consistency in performance.

For example, Bank of Ireland Asset Management is close to the top of table for performance over five years, comfortably beating the Hewitt index, but it has slid towards the bottom in more recent times. So backing BIAM to manage your pension may no longer be such a bright idea.

Apart from the performance merry-goround, another bugbear is charges. Everyone feeding off the pensions food chain gets their cut, from the brokers who sell them to the fund managers who decide where to invest the money to the stockbrokers who buy and sell the shares. All these mouths to feed can leave a big hole in your pension pot, easily gobbling up as much as one-third of all returns earned over the life of the investment.

According to the financial services industry, pensions are an expensive product to sell because we, as consumers, need so much coaxing and handholding before we can be eventually persuaded to sign on the bottom line.

Mandatory pensions should take out all of these costs at a stroke because we would have no choice but to sign up. But it is far from certain if this would be enough to wean the industry off its fatal addiction to fat fees and charges.