SINN FEIN supporters, including Dublin city councillor Mr Christy Burke, gathered on the edge of a peace vigil at the GPO, Dublin, with placards with the words: "All Party Peace Talks Now".
Mr Burke said he was "saddened" by the injuries and deaths in London but that the IRA "had the right to call off the cessation" because the British government placed obstacles in the way of the peace process.
Sinn Fein supporters provided the only organised political presence and their views did not go unchallenged. Referring to the placards, Mr Fergus Finlay, political adviser to the Tanaiste, who attended in a private capacity, said: "If they mean what they say on those posters they'll make sure that London never happens again."
To most of those present the political intricacies meant little.
They stood in silence for 10 minutes in answer to a call for prayer from the event's organiser, Mr Aiden Meade, a member of the Independent Radio and Television Commission. They held hands, sang peace songs and expressed the hope that what happened last Friday would never happen again.
When Ms Susan McHugh, founder of "Peace 93", set up after the Warrington bombing in which Tim Parry (12) and Jonathan Bell (3) lost their lives, came to the microphone to declare, "We want peace and we don't want it tomorrow, we want it now", she drew the only major applause from an attendance which had been quiet and grim faced.
In Warrington, churchmen and civic leaders led more than 100 people in a prayer vigil near the spot where an IRA bomb ripped through the town's shopping centre nearly three years ago.
