State pension for immigrant who did not start work immediately after arrival

I

itsme451

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Hi all, new to this forum. Hope you're keeping well.

I'm a Brit, moved here in 2019 but haven't started a regular job yet. I've been staying at home with my son to allow my wife to work fulltime, but he has been to montessori for the ECCE funded 3 hours a day.
Would I qualify for a home caring period as regards pension entitlement, despite the part-time montessori and having never paid PRSI in Ireland? I did occasional work as a website bug tester, which my wife has declared on her tax return under the €5000 limit for casual earnings. My income from that was only a few hundred euros per year. I have also been studying part-time, but I understand that makes no difference?

Now my son is starting school, and will go to afterschool so I can work fulltime. However I am thinking of moving temporarily to work in the UK. If I do that for say 2 years, then come back to Ireland, would my pension qualifying period only start from when I got a normal job in Ireland?

What if I worked here in Ireland for 1 year before taking the same two years out to work in the UK, would that be much worse in terms of building up a pension? I've read about my pension being based on the average amount of work I have done in Ireland, but I don't understand when I would be considered to have joined the Irish labour market for pension purposes.

Does the pension system here actually reward someone that does no work and claims the dole until about age 50 but then keeps a perfect average? That seems to be the logic of it... surely a bit too mad?
 
itsme451 said:
No, because the way I read the rules,
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If not working outside the UK you are eligible to pay Class 3 voluntary contributions. They are about £800 a year, but extremely good value as it gets you eligibility for a full UK state pension.

My reading of the Irish Homemakers Scheme is that you are eligible as you match the criteria (with caveats in brackets):
  1. full-time carer - (straightforward to prove)
  2. permanently resident in the state - (expect to have to provide a lot of documentation on this as you've arrived relatively recently);
  3. and have worked previously - (I would assume, but am not 100%, that work outside Ireland counts).
So if eligible you will simply get 52 Irish PRSI contributions a year.

My understanding of the rules (not gospel) is that you can be accumulating Irish PRSI credits and making UK voluntary NI contributions at the same time, so in theory you could get both pensions.
 
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