You’ve planned the pension. You’ve built the assets. Maybe you’ve structured your ARF pension and spent years thinking about how to generate an income and look after the people you love. However, a question most people never stop to ask: if you couldn’t make decisions for yourself tomorrow, maybe through illness, an accident, or cognitive decline – who would actually be allowed to manage all of that on your behalf?

For most Irish adults, the honest legal answer is: nobody. Not your spouse, not your children, not your next of kin. Research from the Decision Support Service suggests only around 8% of Irish adults have an Enduring Power of Attorney in place. By contrast, about a third of us have made a will. That gap is the subject of this piece and of a conversation I had recently with Áine Flynn, Director of Ireland’s Decision Support Service (the DSS), the statutory body that registers and supervises these arrangements.

This isn’t really a pension question. It’s a wealth-protection question. And for anyone with a significant pension pot, property and investments, it might be one of the more important boxes you’ve never ticked.

What an Enduring Power of Attorney Actually Is

An Enduring Power of Attorney, an EPA, is a binding legal arrangement you make while you still have full capacity. You’re called the “donor”. You’re saying, in effect: here I am, I can make and express my own decisions today, but if that ever changes, these are the people I trust to step in and make decisions the way I would have made them myself.

The key word is enduring. A loss of capacity can happen progressively, through a degenerative illness in later life, or suddenly, through a stroke or an accident. The point of an EPA is that although your capacity could one day diminish, your choice and your control don’t have to.

And here’s the part that reassures most people: you’re not handing over any authority today. An EPA sits dormant on a register. It only ever comes into effect if you lose capacity at some future point. Which, with a bit of luck, is decades away, if it happens at all. As Áine put it, you could go through your whole life with your capacity fully intact and the EPA would never be used. It’s closer to an insurance policy than a handover, except, unlike most insurance, there are no recurring premiums.

The Comfortable Myth: “Sure, it’ll get sorted”

The most common reason people don’t act is a quiet assumption that it’ll all work itself out. If something happens, the family will sort it. The world won’t end.

It does get sorted. The difficulty is where it gets sorted. In court.

There’s a persistent misperception that a spouse, a grown-up child or a sibling can simply step in and take over bank accounts, pay bills and manage finances on the strength of the family relationship alone. That has never actually been true. As explored in our look at what happens when someone loses capacity without an EPA, without a formal arrangement no one can fully act on your behalf, no matter how much they love you or how well they know what you’d want.

The Assisted Decision-Making (Capacity) Act 2015, commenced on 26 April 2023, dismantled the old wards-of-court system. In its place, if you lose capacity without an EPA, your family may have to apply to the Circuit Court to have someone appointed as your “decision-making representative”, or DMR. A DMR can do many of the same things an attorney can, but with two important differences.

First, the court decides who it is. That might not be the person you’d have chosen, and it can even be a professional appointed from a panel. Second, the DMR has to return to court for recurring reviews of your capacity. An EPA, set up properly, involves no trip to court at all. The reality is, you’re doing yourself, and your family, a real favour by choosing in advance.

“But everything’s in joint names”

Here’s the one that catches people out. The assumption goes: our home, our bank accounts and our investments are in joint names, so if one of us can’t act, the other simply carries on. We’re grand.

We’re not, necessarily. A joint bank account assumes that both account holders have capacity. If one loses it, there’s no automatic authority for the other to keep operating the account on their own. These are shared, divisible assets. And pensions can’t be held jointly at all; an ARF or a pension pot is always in a single name.

Take a fictional couple, Eoghan, 58, a senior private-sector executive, and his wife. Eoghan has €1.2m in pension assets in his own name, the family home and deposits in joint names, and a healthy investment portfolio. Eoghan has a serious stroke. His wife now finds she can’t reliably operate the joint account, can’t make decisions about Eoghan’s pension, and can’t restructure anything to fund his care, not because anyone doubts her, but because she has no legal authority to act for him.  

This is exactly why “we don’t own very much” or “we only have the one child, she’ll just step in” aren’t the reassurances people think they are. Authority to act has to be granted. It doesn’t arrive automatically with love, or with a joint account.

What it Costs and How You Actually Do It

The process changed in recent years. If you made an EPA under the old 1996 Act before 26 April 2023, that one still stands: you don’t need to redo it. But any EPA made since then is created under the 2015 Act and must be registered with the Decision Support Service. The steps, in plain terms:

• Create a MyDSS account and work through the EPA form, deciding who your attorney (or attorneys) will be and what you want them to be able to decide.

• Most people (well over 90%) make what’s called a general authority EPA: “I trust you, you can decide everything for me.” You can be more specific if your situation calls for it.

• You’ll need supporting documents, including a capacity statement from a doctor and a statement from a solicitor or barrister (the “legal practitioner statement”).

• You send it to the DSS. The registration fee is €30. The DSS reviews it to make sure it’s compliant and will actually work, then places it on a secure, searchable register.

If the EPA ever needs to be activated, the “second stage”, an attorney notifies the DSS, two healthcare professionals confirm the loss of capacity, and a further fee of €90 applies. The DSS then supervises the attorney’s role: they file reports on assets, liabilities and income, and continue to report annually. That oversight is new, and it exists to protect you, the donor.

A solicitor can be involved in two ways: you can ask them to handle the whole thing, or you can do most of it yourself and use them only for the legal practitioner statement. Áine noted that the majority of people now do it without a solicitor driving the process, but if your estate is complex, bringing one in is sensible. It’s the kind of item that belongs on a pre-retirement checklist alongside your will and your pension review.

The “Holy Trinity”: Will, EPA and Advance Healthcare Directive

A will is for when you’re gone. An EPA is for when you’re very much still here but unable to make decisions for yourself. The third piece is the Advance Healthcare Directive (AHD) and it’s a separate document, because you can’t plan medical treatment inside an EPA.

An AHD is where you set out your wishes about medical treatment in advance, and you can name a designated healthcare representative to make sure those wishes are known and respected. There’s far less procedure involved than with an EPA, the DSS publishes an approved template, and the Irish Hospice Foundation’s “Think Ahead” pack is another well-known resource. Only about 7% of Irish adults have one. Together, the will, the EPA and the AHD are what Áine calls the holy trinity of planning ahead.

One important reassurance on the EPA itself: an attorney’s powers are broad, but they are not a licence to control you. There is nothing in the Act that lets an attorney detain you or pack you off to a nursing home you’re plainly opposed to. They might sign a nursing-home contract or apply for Fair Deal because you’d want them to, but they can’t act coercively. We covered the wider theme of planning ahead and safeguarding in an earlier conversation worth a listen.

So, What Age Should You Do This? Today.

It’s a fair question with a short answer. Over 70% of EPA applications come from people aged between 70 and 89 and the whole point of the current “You Know Me” awareness campaign is to move that needle earlier. The ideal time is a moment of relative calm: not when capacity has already become a live concern, and not 15 minutes before surgery, but when there’s no sense of needing it any time soon.

Perhaps 50 rather than 90. The DSS has registered an EPA for a 106-year-old who did it online and for someone in their mid-20s who’d seen first-hand what happens when no plan is in place. A major life event (emptying the nest, a significant purchase, a health scare in the family) tends to be the natural prompt. As I say to the people we work with, this is the classic important-but-not-urgent task: rarely pressing but quietly important and forever sliding down the list. Do yourself a favour and bring it up the list.

Where To Start

If this has landed, the next step is genuinely small. Have a look at myepa.ie or the broader Decision Support Service website, both of which walk you through it. Have the conversation with the person you’d trust. And if you’d like it to sit alongside the rest of your plan — your pension, your ARF, your estate — that’s exactly the kind of thing a good financial planner should be raising with you anyway.

What we’re really talking about here isn’t paperwork. It’s the retention of choice and control, whatever life brings. That’s worth a quiet afternoon.

I hope this helps.

Paddy Delaney QFA RPA APA