Recession and the Newly Poor – Ireland

Irish cutbacks pile it on for ‘new poor’, By Guy Chazan, November 27, 2010, Wall Street Journal: “A church-run soup kitchen here symbolizes the human cost of Ireland’s crisis: Middle-class homeowners, squeezed by rising debt and falling incomes, line up for food parcels alongside foreign asylum-seekers and the long-term unemployed. These are Ireland’s ‘new poor’-ordinary people with houses and jobs laid low by years of austerity, and now facing even tougher times as the government slashes public-sector jobs, raises taxes and cuts social welfare. Theresa Dolan runs the Capuchin Day Center near Dublin’s law courts that caters to the swelling ranks of the city’s poor. Before 2008, around 250 people came each day for a hot dinner, she says. Now there are 520. And the visitors’ profile is changing…”