1. You may put an age related maximum percentage of your income into the pension fund (10% up to 30 years, 5% increase every 5 years thereafter). This is invested by a registered pension fund on your behalf. It is exempt from capital gains tax, deemed disposal on index funds, or other types of taxes that normally apply to investments.

2. Your employer may match an amount up to your contribution. Most employers in the tech sector will offer between matching the first 5% to first 10%. While this is income from your employer, to you, it is not considered for income tax purposes.

3. You are normally not allowed withdraw any of this prior to age 50.

4. _However_, if you leave a job with an employer managed pension within 2 years, you can instead refund your entire contributions and either keep them or invest them in your new pension scheme. This is to avoid people having to manage N number of pension schemes from however many former employers. If you choose to do this however, the tax-free status of the employer contributions vanishes. So they get refunded to your employer, and if your employer wanted to give them direct to you, that would be taxable income. Most employers won't want to bother with the paperwork for this.

5. When you draw down your pension, you may pay income tax on the payouts if your pension payouts exceed the tax-free cutoff.

> Stripe cut around 90 jobs from its Dublin office as part of a wider restructuring of its global operations, which saw it reduce its overall workforce by 14 per cent from 8,000 employees down to around 7,000 today.

> The pension clawbacks, which are legally permitted under Irish pension rules, only applied to staff who had been working with the company for less than two years.