A former apprentice butcher who stole over €49,000 from his employer during a “drug-induced paranoia” in the early hours of Christmas Eve last year has avoided a jail sentence.

James Cahill (22) was approached twice by a security guard at Finglas’s Charlestown Shopping Centre in Dublin when he was spotted pushing a wheelie bin in and out of McArdle’s Butchers around 5am.

On both occasions the security guard accepted Cahill’s excuse that he was using the bin to help move into a house across the street.

Cahill, of Ferrycarrig Park, Coolock, Dublin pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to theft of €49,204 from McArdle Meats on December 24, 2013.

Judge Desmond Hogan suspended a four year prison sentence for three years on condition that he keep the peace for that period and he complete 240 hours of unpaid work in the community.

Cahill admitted knowing the shop’s safe codes, which allowed him to steal two days of takings. He has no previous convictions.

Garda Paul Ryan told John Byrne BL, prosecuting, that Cahill later handed a bag with €17,000 of the stolen money over to gardai. He brought officers to where he had stashed a further €5,000 in a shoe down a laneway.

Gda Ryan said he accepted Cahill’s story about handing some of the money to a third party whom he met by chance.

The garda agreed with Anne-Marie Lawlor BL, defending, that this third party had threatened her client with a lump hammer for the cash.

He further accepted that Cahill’s father managed to retrieve some of this money from the third party before it was handed over to gardaí.

Gda Ryan told the court that the butchers’ was out of pocket by €17,000 after it had been paid €10,000 in insurance compensation.

He agreed Cahill, who had a chronic cocaine addiction at the time, was highly unlikely to come before the courts again.

Ms Lawlor told the judge that Cahill had been off sick from work at McArdle Meats in the weeks leading up to the crime because of his cocaine addiction.

She asked Judge Desmond Hogan to take into consideration her client’s early guilty plea, his genuine remorse, previous clean record and the “huge strides” he had made towards rehabilitation.

Judge Hogan described the offence at the higher end of the middle range of seriousness and accepted Cahill had been “in the throes of drug-induced paranoia”.

He commended Cahill’s father for putting himself at risk to get the money back.