Employers should give older employees the flexibility to work part-time to make retirement a gradual transition, not a shock event, ESRI director Alan Barrett has told the Irish Independent.

Prof Barrett said eligibility for the State pension – currently set at 66 and scheduled to rise to 68 in 2028 – was all but certain to rise higher in the 2030s.

He spoke as an ESRI report published yesterday found that the number of workers aged 55 or over had more than doubled here over the past two decades to 413,400, some 18pc of the workforce.

Mr Barrett said too many workers in their 50s were finding career options limited and work conditions inflexible, with retirement looming less as a choice than as an employer-driven outcome.

“Retirement should be a process rather than an event. Very, very sudden and unplanned retirement can be quite bad for your mental health,” he said.

“People underestimate the importance that their job contributes to their identity.”

The ESRI study found that many workers “would prefer a gradual reduction in working hours as they approach retirement and believe that the absence of such options that do not risk reducing pension entitlements is one of the main barriers to working longer”.

Prof Barrett noted that the study found around half of “early leavers” – workers who stopped working by their early 60s – said that they had “retired”.

But he said this masks the reality that many find this choice forced on them by circumstance.

“When people say they’re retiring, if they thought the writing was on the wall…retirement in that situation becomes a bit of a euphemism,” he said.

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