Sir, – Fintan O’Toole is wrong (Opinion, December 20th). I welcomed publication of the report on fuel poverty by the Institute of Public Health. I pointed out that the claim in the accompanying press release: “51 per cent of older people had to go without food or clothing to pay for heating in their homes” was not true. It is not true.
The IPH has since written to me stating it “regret[s] that the press release associated with the launch and issued by the IPH was unclear about what aspects of the research the headline figures referred to and, as you suggested on the day, the headline figures were used by elements of the media as indicative of the general older population. A fact we will learn from.” The IPH acknowledges we “are proactively addressing this issue” in the Affordable Energy Strategy that I published on November 27th and expressed the hope that in its implementation I would make full use of its report. The real issue of fuel poverty will not be addressed through wildly wrong claims about the scale of the problem. – Yours, etc,