There are times when living in this country feels as if we're all characters in a Frank McCourt novel.

A dreary, unrelenting grey cloud has descended upon us as, every day, the news lurches downwards. Every chink of light blotted out by worse woes that plunge us into a deeper gloom. Tax receipts are on target – but they're down massively on last year. The first toxic loans will finally be taken into Nama at the end of the month – but the gargantuan losses published by the banks means they're going to need much more in recapitalisation, so taxpayer exposure is worsening. The jobs crisis is stabilising – but only because of emigration. House prices are dropping but one-sixth of our housing stock is empty and practically unsellable. You thought the health service was improving? Last week, large chunks of its family social care services were exposed as dysfunctional. Thanks to public sector workers' action over pay cuts, you can't get a passport in under 10 days or get someone in a HSE office to answer the phone.

Even our graduates aren't as clever as we thought they were.

And now, just to keep us truly despondent, the government tells us that, because of the good news that we're all living longer, we'll all have to work an extra one to three years longer. How much of this could have been avoided had such a huge portion of the National Pensions Reserve Fund not been siphoned off to bail out the banks is unclear. But we are where we are, as they keep telling us, and it seems we'll pay for the banks in years, as well as in euro.

But the move to a pensionable age of 68 raises many questions. What happens if employers want their staff to retire at 65 because they feel they are no longer able for the job? Unemployment benefit stops at 65 – how are the 70% of people without pensions currently supposed to live in the meantime? What if a person is unemployed? How do they survive before their entitlements as a senior citizen kick in? Currently our entire workplace legislation is based on the definition of an employee aged 16 to 65, so it will have to be overhauled in its entirety to stay in line with the new state pension age.

The most important aspect of the framework, however, is the plan to make membership of a workplace pension scheme mandatory rather than voluntary.

The aim is that by 2014, all 22-year-olds in work will be compelled by law to sign up to a pension scheme. But with so little detail about how such a massive increase in pension coverage will work, many questions have yet to be answered.

Small firms who don't provide pensions have said this could push them over the edge. They warn of pay cuts to fund the proposed 2% contribution they will have to make along with the 2% from the government and 4% from the employee. Employer reaction has generally been as negative as is possible.

Social welfare minister Mary Hanafin has been soothing. Apparently, unlike the rising qualification age for a state pension, if economic circumstances do not allow, then the date for the introduction of the mandatory occupational pension can be pushed back. Such softness in the face of business opposition will not help assuage the unions.

A large part of this framework involves a radical overhaul of public sector pensions too. Changes to public sector pensions will leave those starting a career in the public service considerably worse off when they retire than current employees. We can expect a strong union backlash. Listening more intently to the concerns of business than employees will not help their mood.

On the private pension side, there are many questions. The problems of the private pensions industry are legion. Some 90% of defined benefit occupational schemes are now in deficit. Those who have invested in contributory pensions feel their money has been flushed down the drain. Irish pension funds are some of the worst performing in Europe and part of the explanation for the fact that 345,000 houses now stand empty is that many were bought as investments in lieu of a pension. Pension managers and advisors are not trusted, but under this scheme, people will be legally bound to invest their hard earned money in their funds.

Employees will need to hear an awful lot more about what sort of regulation will govern the management, advice and fees involved given such a massive injection of funds. They will want to know who can opt out and for how long, and what returns are guaranteed – if any – before they part with a penny. If they want public confidence in this policy, these are issues that Mary Hanafin, Brian Lenihan and Brian Cowen need to address regularly and clearly in order to assuage people's genuine concerns.

After the credit crunch and the banking crisis, the pensions timebomb is probably the most difficult and intractable problem this country faces in the longer term.

Those last three words are the nub of the problem. Politics, in the main, is about short-term policy. Pensions are politics on the never-never. They throw up a range of difficult decisions that have to be taken now, but for which the full political advantage cannot be reaped for anything from a decade to 40 years.

The financially fruitful parts of this framework – the raising of the pensionable age and the cutbacks in public sector pension entitlements will no doubt be pushed with great fervour by this cost-cutting government.

But it is important that the most long-term and far-seeing element – the aim of bringing as many as 70% of people into a pension scheme that will enable them to live out their old age as far away from Angela's Ashes territory as possible – is not long fingered just because some smaller employers don't like it.