A taxi driver with a string of convictions for stealing thousands of euro from customers has had his taxi licence revoked.

Patrick Lyons (45), from Ventry Road, Cabra, Dublin, received a two-and-a-half-year suspended sentence this month after pleading guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to withdrawing €550 from a customer’s bank account after keeping her bank card when she used it to pay her fare last December.

In September last year, he appeared at the District Court on up to 24 counts of taking bank cards and cash from alleged victims who he had picked up as fares.

Lyons had previously stolen a customer’s iPhone in 2013 when the customer left it in his taxi.

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However, he was still able to operate as a taxi driver because he appealed a move by gardaí to have his licence revoked. He was back in the District Court yesterday where his appeal was being heard.

Lyons told the court he became a taxi driver in 2000.

He said his life took a turn for the worse when his relationship with his partner broke down and he moved back in with his mother.

“I was having seizures and I wasn’t working. I suffered from depression. I was staying in my room and watching telly.

“I started going to the local pub in Cabra to interact with people. My lifestyle wasn’t great. I got introduced to cocaine in the toilets,” he said.

• Read More: Taxi driver who robbed his customers up to 24 times keeps licence

Lyons said he got into debt and people started coming to his mother’s house saying someone he had introduced them to had “done a legger” from the pub with cocaine they were buying – and the money they gave him for it – and Lyons would have to pay them €700. He said he was afraid he would be shot.

He told how he started stealing from his customers.

“I robbed things to get some of the money up. I stole credit cards from customers,” he said, adding he watched the customers put their PINs into the card reader and then used the cards to withdraw cash from ATMs.

He said his period of stealing lasted a year from December 2017 to December last year, he had now given up cocaine and alcohol and taken part in a treatment course.

“It’ll never happen again if I get one more chance,” he told the court while close to tears.

Superintendent Tom Murphy, of the Garda Roads Policing Unit, put it to Lyons that he had a “long history”, and said: “You have made promises before and given undertakings.”

He told Judge Michael Coghlan that Lyons’s latest conviction was at the Circuit Court on November 6 where he was given a two-and-a-half-year suspended sentence for theft from a passenger.

Refusing Lyons’s appeal, the judge said: “My difficulty is I wouldn’t be satisfied that an independent party getting into a taxi would not be putting themselves in danger given the background this man has with undesirable elements.”

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