Riot was easily predictable
In the Daily Ireland on Thursday, February 23 - 48 hours before the parade - Ciarán Barnes wrote about the Republican Sinn Féin counter-demonstration. Under the headline "Loyalists may carry Dublin bomber pictures" he went on to write that "Continuity IRA also vowed to disrupt the parade".
Surely our gardaí in their Special Detective Unit or elsewhere, should be monitoring that paper in particular.
With such data available, the possible absence of confirmation from covert sources can hardly gainsay the published Belfast report. That reporter has also covered CIRA conspiracies on several occasions. The source is thus credible and the report plausible. Why then ignore it in planning?
We also had "RSF President" O'Bradaigh on Matt Cooper's show on Today FM on Friday around 6pm talking about their counter-demonstration.
Any event nominally run by the political wing of any IRA outfit, also deserves vigilant and strong response capability, not least given the length of the planned parade. But this was not delivered by the 348-strong garda presence.
The incendiary sectarian postings on an unofficial Shamrock Rovers-focused web-site only repeated the unproven suggestion in the Daily Ireland headline (and nowhere else) that the parade "may carry Dublin bomber picture".
This was an indefensible incitement to hatred and worse, by that Belfast organ. The real story is the significant origin of that false allegation, which did not start with an unofficial Southern soccer website.
Tom Carew
Merton Drive
Dublin 6
