You're right. The cars that were burnt out on Nassau Street weren't targetted for having "Love Ulster" bumper stickers or even yellow regs.
How do you mean? Do you mean that it would be wrong if the gardaí refused to give the go-ahead to the march if they believed that this insignificant minority would cause significant and uncontainable violence? That this would somehow constitute a victory for the types that want to cause aggro, and indeed be some kind of an affront to the other 99.9% of us? Are this 99.9% of people insinuated to be in favour of this march?
Decisions like that are made every day. I'm sure there's Rovers fans who'd love to pull a Willie, as it were, at Dalymount and sit down in the middle of the Jodi and just sing and support their team, but BEST would allow the probable actions of a minority to dictate to them whether they could let them sit there or not. Is that a victory for violence and an injustice on the 99.999999% of Irish people who won't be at that match or is it an example of the application of common sense based on a rational appraisal of the likely motives of the Rovers fans and an analysis of the probably adverse reaction of the Bohs fans? The analogy is incomplete of course.
Unfortunately, though, because of what happened last year, if you're of any kind of a rioting bent the concept of a second "Love Ulster" march coming to town is understood to be an opportunity to line up against the gardaí like the heroes of '06 (the Love Ulster people were not involved in any fighting), slumming it for an afternoon and pretending you're a misunderstood, oppressed and disenfranchised punk in a police state with no other way of expressing your frustration at being continually downtrodden by those cursed triumphalist Orangies.
In my gut I feel that they do have the right to march; in my heart I hope they march and are met with tumbleweeds and possibly an eighty-year-old man from Sandymount waving a union flag; in my head I don't see what letting them get their riot would accopmlish.
There is no way that this march can pass off peacefully now, after the precedent that was set last year by dint of a combination of factors. It is still unclear what exactly they're ostenisbly hoping to achieve ("we think the time is right just after the elections" :rolleyes:) except for to cause a major headache for the government, the gardaí, and the handwringing classes, and to create some kind of instability in the Six Counties.
I'm unsure as to whether it has definitely gotten the official nod from the gardaí, though. Has it?