Homelessness can never be an excuse for law-breaking

IT’S fair to say that the housing crisis has been badly served when it comes to some of its figureheads. In 2014, mother-of-three Sabrina McMahon said she had to live in her car while owning a house in Athy; months later, tragic Jonathan Corrie died in a doorway before it was revealed that his family gave him two houses. Now we can add Margaret Cash to the list.

The young mother-of-seven came to symbolise the desperation facing Irish families when the story of her six sons sleeping in a Garda station made international headlines. Margaret and her brood were toasted by Miriam O’Callaghan, her passionate condemnation of Government ineptitude was widely publicised and she addressed the masses during the recent housing protest in Dublin.

But now it has emerged that while Margaret sought shelter with gardaí in Tallaght last summer, she was facing shoplifting charges after racking up 38 separate convictions. This week she pleaded guilty to stealing clothing worth €321 from Penneys in Rathfarnham, Dublin, claiming that she only did it for her children when they were living rough and had no laundry facilities.

‘I’m not justifying it, what I did was wrong... but it was a very difficult situation at the time, the kids needed dry clothes, clean clothes. So I couldn’t afford them, I took them,’ she said.

Margaret’s conscience is her own business and let’s hope she has learnt that she’s a far better mother when she obeys the laws of the State. The same State she expects so much from in terms of housing, education and subsistence only to go out and risk a jail term for a trolley piled high with cheap clothing.

But her crime spree is, above all, a blow to the thousands of homeless victims who would never dream of breaking the law and who now must rightly fear that revelations of criminal behaviour from homeless activists might cause the tide of human sympathy to ebb away.