Deise I don't see where Brendan estimates jobless households at 16.5%.
What I do see is a spreadsheet where he estimates jobless adults at 16.8%, a different thing.
Using his spreadsheet we might estimate jobless households as follows:
Adults in couples both working 10=5 households 0 jobless
Couples one working 18=9H,0XJ
Couples neither working 6=3H,3XJ
Singles working 4=4H,0XJ
Singles not working 2=2H,2XJ
Total 40=23H,5XJ
That's a percentage of jobless households of 22%, remarkably close to the maligned figure

So I repeat that the semantic faux pas to which the
Boss has fessed doesn't amount to a hill of beans and certainly no need for public retraction.
Now thanks to
Protocol we have the full picture which I will now repeat.
We start with the unemployed rate, U.
We then have a big jump to the without job rate XJ, consisting of carers, students, children, disabled, employed at less than 20%
There follows a big fall to those living in jobless households, the jobless rate JR, this fall driven by people with jobs removing those living with them from being JR, most notably couples one working.
The final transmission is to the percentage of households which are jobless HJR; we don't actually see this statistic anywhere though as
Boss admits he repeated the erroneous NESC citing of just such a percentage. Intuitively one might expect HJR to be actually higher than HR as the more people are in a household the less likely that household will be jobless.
So as
Protocol observes there is no great mystery in JR being higher than U, it's just that the first jump above dominates the second fall. To understand why we are outliers in EU terms we need to dig deeper into the two jumps. In the first jump we see that we have much more carers and to a lesser extent more disabled. The former possibly reflects that the traditional single bread earner family unit has survived more in Ireland than elsewhere and/or we have more single parent carers, this latter together with the higher rate of disability claimants possibly deriving from SW abuse, but let's leave that to the marathon runners
In the second transmission, the fall from being XJ to being JR
Protocol suggests that our fall is less than others as our inactive people have a greater tendency to combine with like persons and therefore not to be "bailed out" by someone employed. I am not so sure on this one or on what sociological inference we could take from it.
So in summary, no reason at all for a retraction from the
Boss.