IRA supporters attack police, thwart Protestant march

? 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 the major tourist district, Temple Bar.

Ireland’s national police force said 14 people – six officers and eight civilians, including rioters and a journalist – were hospitalized, mostly with head wounds. 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.

A car burns near the Irish parliament as more than 200 Irish Republican Army supporters clashed with police on Dublin's central boulevard Saturday in a bid to block an unprecedented Protestant parade from passing through the capital. The protesters hurled bottles, bricks, fireworks and other objects at police who were trying to clear the hostile crowd. Two police officers and a journalist were injured.

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.