Some commentators believe it's more important to strike a haughty pose than deal with the substance of a crisis. When 'crisis' and 'pension' are put into the same sentence, God help the reader, who tends to be treated with condescension by some daily newspaper columnists. It is as if the savings of at least 750,000 people are of little concern.

In truth, several crises are brewing in the Irish pension industry. Only half of the population have anywhere near adequate long-term savings, and those savings, when invested even over long periods, fail to provide what many expect an investment to deliver.

But there is another little-discussed scandal: right under our noses the pension and investment industry here has ignored best practice and invest huge amounts of our savings in the tiny Irish market. The practice also flouts the investment manager's basic principle: diversify risk.

Outside of the business pages of the Sunday Tribune there has been little discussion of what amounts to a scandal. But first let's look at the chaotic nature of our failing pensions policy. For years, the policy has not been working despite the huge cost to the public of the billions of euro in tax credits to lure people to buy private pensions.

The pensions system here is probably in as bad a state as the health system, and both rely on hiding the huge subsidies they receive in a system of double taxation for citizens involving public and private funding. My suspicion is that policymakers just do not get the pension crisis because they personally are insulated by fur-lined public pensions.

The OECD said recently that there are no winners in Ireland's incoherent private-public pensions policy. The lowest paid and non-pensioned have incomes in state pensions that will barely keep them out of poverty in retirement. Then, every citizen pays a second tax in the billions of euro the government gives in tax credits to subsidise a failing private pensions industry.

It is as if policy is designed to look after the interests of the people who sell pensions, using state funds. But the OECD does not examine the scandal of where the industry then invests money.

The amount of cash invested in Irish shares and the cross-ownership of Irish stocks by local institutions is a huge corporate governance issue for the investment community because they have for decades placed a speculative bet on the Irish stock market. The industry, owned by banks here, has bizarrely argued for years that putting billions of euro into the Irish stock market has been the best use of the investments.

When I first wrote about this several years ago, an average 30% of all the money collected from pension savers was placed in a handful of local shares. The industry argued then that this practice of avoiding currency risk would disappear as it switched to investing across eurozone markets. But for the next decade it continued to over-invest here.

People who advise multinational companies on the best investment strategies estimate that €10bn of the €90bn raised from Irish people and invested in long-term savings has been over-invested in local companies and the returns here have underperformed as a result. The money was also a hidden subsidy for the Irish stock market, dominated by a handful of banks and construction firms.

The industry now says the level of investment has fallen sharply. But last spring an average 15% of pension money was still invested in Irish shares, and only a meltdown in the stock market reduced that. The Iseq has been one of the worst places to invest in the world for the past two years. No surprise, then, that Irish pensions too have been among the worst performers over the past few years.