Is begging on the street illegal?

I think you should have look at the origin of why people become addicts , are they self medicating for trauma or mental I’ll health , is it exposure via family as in it’s seen as okay , is the area they grew up in , lack of family bond and so on.

Not one addict ever set out to become an addict .

Maybe the "sweet free money" is doing a better service satiating an addicts craving or helping a family abroad to survive instead of being wasted on some pile of worthless dross that kept a marketing department that might have been employed usefully, churning out unwanted adverts that numb the mind more effectively than the addicts fix.

Giving to the beggars in that case is a win, win. The more worthless the rubbish sold, the more resources are needed to dress it up to look, feel or smell desirable thus destroying the planet in the process.

Instead of driving to work to make and advertise tarted up soap products and food, advertisers could get digging and do some useful work instead of assaulting the public with their inane messages.

The grateful public would have more money for beggars, a nicer planet that might be around for the grand kids and the chance that some of the unwatchable junk on RTE is actually not too bad when uninterrupted by "the rattling of the stick in the swill bucket".

like things you are specifically not allowed to do, or get involved in, or just anything in general that your job does'nt allow you to do. Anything your job stops you from doing, regarding the homeless/homeless people

I saw a fella get a fiver once and on another occasion he was given a note, I think a fiver but wasn't close enough to see . He has a council house and sold most of the furniture for drugs

While there are undoubtedly cases of real hardship leading to begging, a huge amount of it is organised and the profits filter up the chain to those in charge. Roma begging is a well documented example of this. Those actually begging get little, the major money funds "kings" or tribal leaders in the home country where opulent mansions are built in Roma villages. It's a business, like any other, and like any business, when there are no profits the business folds or moves elsewhere. I remember living in a nordic country where the city mayor appealed to people to not give to them, the profit dried up and they moved on. I'm all for a good social system helping those in genuine need - but organised begging should be stamped out.