CHILDREN sitting on O'Connell Bridge with cardboard signs saying they are hungry and homeless have become a disquieting feature of the capital.
But yesterday it was a small boy with a bucket as big as himself who attracted worried glances from passers by on O'Connell Street.
He appeared to be no more than about five years of age.
Fifteen minutes later he had crossed the street to join a boisterous crowd of teenagers and children, boys and girls at the foot of the O'Connell monument. His companions seemed to range from about seven months to 17 years.
Somebody handed him what seemed to be a small cardboard box and he crossed a busy O'Connell Street by himself to get on to O'Connell Bridge.
When he sat down and unfolded the box it turned out to be the infamous sheet of cardboard declaring him to be homeless and hungry and requesting money for food. His companions abandoned him, moving down O'Connell Street.
He suddenly noticed they were gone and ran after them, shouting. When he caught up with them at the junction of Middle Abbey Street and O'Connell Street one of the older children took his piece of cardboard and flung it into the street. The child ran after it and picked it up, but left two pence behind him, which one of the others grabbed.
They then ran to the bus stop and went off on the number 38 bus.
By their accents and their reddish hair one would assume - perhaps wrongly but probably correctly - that they were Travellers.
Only a small handful of Travellers, it should be said, still put children out begging on the streets.
Since everybody who uses O'Connell Bridge knows where children are put out begging, this behaviour is, it seems fair to assume, being tolerated.
It would also be fair to assume that if an Irish Times reader was to put his or her five year old out begging on his own on O'Connell Bridge, and left him to make his own way through dangerous traffic that parent would be in a great deal of trouble with the Garda and the Eastern Health Board very fast.
Why does this child deserve less?