By John Spain

NO one saw it coming.

Of course after it had happened, after a few hundred hardcore Republicans and a few hundred more ordinary thugs and hooligans had turned the center of Dublin on Saturday into somewhere that looked more like Baghdad, everyone was saying that more precautions should have been taken. We should have known that a Loyalist march in the city could cause a serious confrontation.

But hindsight is a wonderful thing. The truth is that no one saw it coming. And that is why Dublin was so unprepared for the ugly and terrifying riot that erupted in the city center on Saturday.

Only a few hundred Gardai (police) had been assigned to the event, and they were keeping a low profile. There were also a few dozen riot squad officers somewhere in the city as backup in case they were needed.

But the Garda strategy overall was to be as low key as possible. The general feeling was that the vast majority of Dubliners would be far too busy shopping or getting in the mood for the next day’s rugby international to pay any attention to a bunch of Loyalists marching down O’Connell Street with their screechy fife and drum bands.

That is why no one was concerned that there were piles of rubble and building material on O’Connell Street (part of the never ending improvement works) which could be handy ammunition for anyone wanting to start a riot.

That is why no one paid much attention to dissident Republican bulletin boards that for the past few weeks had been calling for the Loyalist march to be stopped.

The assessment was that this was just the extreme fringe of Republicanism and there were not enough of them to cause any trouble that could not easily be contained.

Adding weight to this assessment that trouble was unlikely was the Sinn Fein stance — they did not approve of the march and they were advising their supporters to keep away. At worst, there would be jeering and banner waving by a few dissident Republican cranks.

This overall assessment that there would be little reaction to the Loyalist march was largely correct. Around 99.9% of Dubliners did their normal Saturday things and could not have cared less that a few hundred Loyalists were to march down O’Connell Street.

As far as most Dubliners are concerned, the Troubles are over and at this stage the North is boring, way down the list of everyday priorities. If a few hundred loyalists want to march down O’Connell Street in memory of relatives murdered by the IRA, then let them.

That was the government’s assessment of how most people in Dublin would react. It was an assessment that sat comfortably with the government’s own view that we all should be willing to show sympathy and extend the hand of friendship if Loyalists are to feel confident in dealing with the south and in joining a new power-sharing administration in the North.

The war is over. It’s time for everyone to accept each other and move on.

There was also some sympathy among people here for those who were involved in the so-called Love Ulster parade, a loyalist organization called Fair — Families Acting for Innocent Relatives.

People here remember the vicious campaign run by the IRA in the border areas when the Troubles were at their height. Protestants on isolated farms along the border were targeted, with farmers shot dead in their yards.

You did not have to be directly involved in the security forces to be a target — a brother or a cousin in uniform was enough. Protestant postmen, milkmen, delivery van drivers ... any Protestant doing an isolated job in the border areas was a target. It was ethnic cleansing on a small scale.

The deep hurt and anger that this caused in the Protestant community up there has not gone away. That is why Fair was set up — to give a voice to the relatives who are still grieving after so long.

These Loyalists want people in the south to understand what they went through. They want some recognition of their pain, of what was done to them in the name of a 32-county Irish republic.

Of course there have been questions raised about how one-sided Fair is, about how Catholics were assassinated in return at the time, about the crossover between the security services in the border areas and the Protestant paramilitaries.

A few of those now involved in Fair would fall into this category, although they would claim that at the time they were protecting the Protestant community by whatever means they could from genocide by a hidden enemy.

Whatever about the background of some of those involved, the general view here of Fair is that most of its members are exactly what the name of the organization says — innocent relatives of murdered Protestants. And the general feeling here is that at this stage there is no harm in letting them march in Dublin and showing them some sympathy.

But as we now know to our cost, there are many hardline Republicans who don’t accept any of this, whose hatred of Loyalists is as visceral as it ever was. And that hatred is extended to the Gardai and the government in the south who are seen as collaborators with the British.

We now know that a couple of buses of Republicans came down from Newry to confront the Loyalist marchers. But that is not that important.

What is important is that so many Republican sympathizers down here took part in the mayhem and were joined by so many ordinary hooligans. It is not credible that only the dissidents in the Irish Republican Socialist Party or Republican Sinn Fein (the political wing of the Continuity IRA) were involved because there are not enough of them.

The unsavory fact is that when a major chance of creating trouble arises the distinction between Republican Sinn Fein and Respectable Sinn Fein goes out the window. Although the Sinn Fein leadership had distanced itself from the protest against the march, the Gardai believe that many ordinary Sinn Fein supporters in Dublin were involved in the violence on Saturday.

One indication of this was the amount of “Up the IRA” chanting. Another was the degree of preparation for and organization of the riot, with weapons and missiles like snooker balls and petrol bombs brought in, cars torched, mobile phones being used to direct the mob and so on.

Another indication was the ferocity of the violence used. It is this level of hatred, not just of Loyalists but of the authorities in the south and particularly of the Gardai, that is the hallmark of rank and file Sinn Fein supporters here.

They hate the state they live in. They are the alienated young hooligans and young adults from the deprived state housing suburbs around the city.

They are cynical, aggressive, semi-criminal. They are unlikely to be working, even in our full employment economy. Living on state benefits leaves more time for drinking and making trouble.

The depth of their disaffection is frightening. This is what Sinn Fein fosters and feeds on, this cynicism about the state we live in, about the political system, about the economy, about the distribution of wealth.

This a la carte attitude of mainstream Republicans to the rule of law and their involvement in criminality, supposedly for the movement, sets the tone for the rank and file and the hangers on. It sends out a message that the state here is the enemy and the law does not deserve respect.

In that sense, the attitude of Sinn Fein provides a focus for the unhappiness and aggression of the young hooligans who were on the streets of Dublin on Saturday. Many of them have no direct connection with Sinn Fein. But the behavior of Republicans around them on Saturday provided encouragement and a convenient justification for what they were doing.

The Sinn Fein leaders at all levels had been careful to put distance between themselves and the riot, but they still carry a lot of the responsibility for the behavior that shocked the city.

They encourage the sense of injustice that drives many of the rioters. They foster the victim culture in which the state is to blame for everything and burning cars and looting stores is justifiable.

It is unlikely that the Gardai will ever again take such a laid back attitude when Loyalists come visiting here. In the meantime they will try to make amends for last weekend’s failure by using CCTV footage to identify all those who were involved, although this will be difficult since the ringleaders were wearing hoodies, baseball caps and football scarves across their faces.

Because of the threat from the rioters, the Loyalists were unable to march down O’Connell Street. But at least the Gardai were able to get them back on their buses and move them to the Dail (Parliament) where they able to do a token march before heading back to the North.

This was something. But the fact remains that a mob of Republican thugs and ordinary hooligans were able to stop a Loyalist march down O’Connell Street, a march which had been given approval by the authorities here. That is a subversion of democracy and cannot be tolerated.

Unionists are unlikely to be shocked by the riot; they’ve lived through violence for years and they know that what happened on Saturday does not represent the feelings of the people of Dublin. Tourists in Dublin who were caught up in the mayhem were probably terrified, but of course they have the choice of not coming back here again.

But those who are most horrified and worried at Saturday’s events are the rest of us, the ordinary people of Dublin. There is real anger that this kind of thing could happen here.

It’s another indication of how disparate and disenchanted parts of our society have become, in spite of all our success. And it’s a reminder of the sickening violence that seems to be just a step behind Republican politics here.