A very high proportion of Irish households are now living in energy poverty.
That's the warning from the ESRI, which says it's now become a key policy issue, in light of record inflation.
However, people are missing out on financial supports because there's no official definition for energy poverty in Ireland.
Senior research officer with the ESRI, Muireann Lynch, says Ireland needs to stop measuring just energy usage, but energy deprivation too.
"These are households that maybe their expenditure on energy hasn't gotten so high, but that's more because that they're just cutting back on energy.
"They're not heating their houses to the extent that they'd like to. They might even be turning off lights kind of sitting in the dark. And those are the data that we really need to get us."
