Speaking on March 23 2000, to the annual conference of the National Federation of Pensioners' Associations, I said:

Let me demonstrate how, until recently, older people were the grey invisibles of Irish society.

When the first Employment Equality Bill went through the Oireachtas, it outlawed discrimination in employment on a whole raft of new grounds — from ethnic origin to sexual orientation. But it was left to me, ironically since I am an employer, to point out they had forgotten one of the most obvious discrimination grounds of all — age.

That was a revealing slip by the conventional wisdom of six or seven years ago.

Now all that is changed. Now, age is in. 

In a society suddenly short of labour, the over-55s have become visible again. Now the Irish economy needs the older generation. Scarcely have people been given the gold watch than they are being wooed back into the workforce.

The first thing about this turnaround that pensioners should appreciate is that it gives them more clout as a force in society. 

If pensioners want to be successful in lobbying government, they need to recognise fully their newfound strength and be more assertive. It’s not in the nature of older people to be aggressive, but that is precisely what’s needed to lobby successfully in the hurly-burly of Irish life. The new cachet attached to older people should give pensioners the confidence to look for the fulfilment of their demands as rights, not as favours.

Because we in Ireland have tended to treat older people as if they were invisible, pensioners have in many cases been denied the opportunity of a fully active retirement. 

I hope this new drive to bring people back into the workforce will have a much wider effect, in highlighting to all retired people that there are many ways they can make a valuable contribution to society and our quality of life.

I see three distinct ways in which pensioners can enrich their own lives and the lives of others.

The first is by taking on a conventional job, either part-time or full-time. I am not sure our tax and social welfare systems encourage this activity by pensioners; indeed they may well be an obstacle. If so, we should remove the impediments.

That first way is when people simply rejoin the active economy as players, as before. The other two options are different: they involve doing things that are either on the fringes of the economy or outside it altogether. But they can provide immense satisfaction, both to the people themselves and to the wider community.

One is an option I have encountered in America, where in my tireless pursuit of glory in golf, I met senior citizens providing important services to visitors to golf courses there. The recompense the people got was free access to play on the courses themselves, and so they were able to enjoy golf more often at less expense than would have been the case otherwise. Everyone won, because the services involved might not have been economical to provide on any other basis.

This idea, of older people doing jobs which simply would not exist if they didn’t do them, is now very widely entrenched in America — and in my view we should aim to learn from their example.

It’s particularly so in the broad area of education. 

Many libraries in America have the services of professional librarians backed up and extended by volunteer older people. These older people can add great value to what a library can provide, by doing things that otherwise would just not be done.

Similarly, schools and colleges could benefit hugely from input by people who have a lifetime of experience to share, in many areas that are still fully relevant today.

Suggest this in Ireland and people tend to scream about taking jobs away from those who need them, but this is simply not the case.

Many public services have been stripped right down to the bone, and there is no conceivable scenario in which they would suddenly take on more staff to provide fringe services. Yet it is this unfinanceable fringe that could make the difference between a Spartan and a delightful experience, for the user of a library or for a student in the education system.

In Ireland we already have a fine tradition of voluntary work, but my point is that the scale on which we do it bears no relation to the importance we could give it – if we properly redefined the role of older people in our society.

The era we are entering into — hurtling into, might be a better term — is the Information Age. So we are rightly putting a lot of stress on knowledge, perhaps without fully understanding what knowledge truly is. There is more to knowledge than information; there is also wisdom. 

Dare I say that young people today often have the knowledge; sometimes they lack the wisdom an older head could provide.

If Ireland is really to become a leader in this new era, I’d like to think it would not simply be a society where only young people can perform. We have the opportunity to use the different skills and experiences of all the generations.

Let us embrace that opportunity, and make a worthwhile place in the sun for all.