February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
They were among the biggest demonstrations that have ever taken place on Irish soil, with about 100,000 on the streets in Dublin and more than 15,000 in Belfast. In comparison, few protests in relation to Northern Ireland have ever reached the scale of the Dublin demo — perhaps the Feb. 2, 1972 demonstration following the Bloody Sunday shootings approached that scale. (At the time it was described as the biggest demonstration in Ireland in 50 years.) But after that it was difficult to muster such numbers on any issue to do with the North, mainly because Southerners quickly lost interest in the conflict on their own doorstep. It seemed irrelevant to them.
I think this is still largely the case. For the majority of the population of the Irish Republic, the conflict (one can