When ‘financial distress’ translates into poverty, hunger and want

ARE you familiar with the term “financial distress”?

It’s not one I ever came across before — at least, that is, until I began to look at the Central Statistics Office’s latest Quarterly National Household Survey.

And as I began reading it, it dawned on me. Official Ireland may have developed a new term, a new way of describing one of the things we don’t like to talk about. It’s almost as if, if we got the real meaning out into the open, people might start protesting. There might be anger, outrage even. It might come to be seen as something of a scandal.