Sunday, February 26, 2006 - 12:00 AM
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JOHN COGILL / AP
A car burns near the Irish parliament in Dublin, Ireland, where a parade protest turned into a free-for-all with protestors hurling bottles, bricks, concrete blocks and fireworks at police officers.
By SHAWN POGATCHNIK
The Associated Press
DUBLIN, Ireland — Several hundred Irish Republican Army supporters attacked police in Dublin on Saturday to protest an unprecedented parade through the capital by Protestants from Northern Ireland.
In scenes rare for the Republic of Ireland, protesters hurled bottles, bricks, concrete blocks and fireworks at police officers trying to clear the hostile crowd from Dublin's most famous boulevard, O'Connell Street.
Even though the Protestants abandoned their parade, the battles spread to streets near the national parliament and museums, as well as a shopping center and Temple Bar, the major tourist district.
Ireland's national police force said 14 people — six officers and eight civilians, including rioters and a journalist — were hospitalized. More than a dozen other people suffered less serious injuries.
The police advised shoppers and tourists to avoid the entire city center, which is normally packed with pedestrians on Saturdays.
Officers in full riot gear arrested at least 37 protesters as a police surveillance plane circled overhead.
The protesters, mostly young men covering their faces with scarves, chanted pro-IRA slogans as they waged running battles with riot police and other officers on horseback for more than an hour, forcing shops on Ireland's most famous street to close.
Afterward, O'Connell Street was littered with broken paving stones and glass from shattered shop windows.
Near Leinster House, Ireland's parliament building, at least three cars were flipped over and set on fire, while windows on scores of cars and businesses were smashed.
The rioters' mayhem forced Protestant hard-liners to abandon their plan to parade through Dublin. It would have been the first parade in Dublin by pro-British Protestants since Ireland's partition into a mostly Protestant north and mostly Roman Catholic south in 1921.
However, the would-be marchers, who came accompanied by traditional bands of fife and drum, instead traveled by bus to the besieged parliamentary building.
Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern said Protestant "unionists," who favor Northern Ireland's union with Britain, should have enjoyed freedom to demonstrate their views, and he condemned the rioters as anti-democratic.
"There is absolutely no excuse for the disgraceful scenes in Dublin today," Ahern said. "It is the essence of Irish democracy and republicanism that people are allowed to express their views freely and in a peaceful manner. People who want only to attack gardai [police] and property have no respect for their fellow citizens."
Leaders of the aborted parade praised police efforts to protect them, but nonetheless they handed a letter of protest to Justice Minister Michael McDowell inside Leinster House as the trouble continued.
A Protestant politician said the rioters had mostly traveled to Dublin from Catholic areas of Northern Ireland.
"We have received a warm welcome from ordinary Dubliners," Democratic Unionist Party legislator Jeffrey Donaldson said. "But it's clear these Republicans have come from north of the border and other areas intent only on causing trouble."