All in all, a very satisfactory Saturday. Thousands of tourists here for the rugby and the film festival were given the chance to witness Dublin's first, glorious, anti-Protestant riot.
As fascist thugs took over the centre of the capital, this State once again showed itself incapable of performing even a rudimentary function of statehood, the maintenance of order.
Meanwhile on Talk FM, Continuity Radio, there was a steady diet of anti-Orange jokes. Marvellous; bloody marvellous. And remember: we are still two months short of the celebrations of the 1916 Rising, during which the insurgents actually behaved rather worse than Saturday's revellers.
When will we finally learn of the iron law of consequence? When will we finally accept that certain forms of behaviour on this small island will invite a reaction from the other side? When will we learn that tribalism begets tribalism, and tribalism begets violence? Cause and effect, cause and effect.
Instead we learn nothing. Ever. We combine insane and vainglorious tribal pride with a long-standing institutional ineptitude which would do credit to Zimbabwe. Ten years ago, when English football fans dismantled Lansdowne Road, where were Garda reserves? Miles away in Fitzgibbon Street and Dún Laoghaire, while a couple of gallant cadets from Templemore had to confront the mob. Who was sacked for that debacle? No one.
Naturally, since then, things have got far worse. The organisational culture of our police force was best characterised by PJ Stone last week when he announced that An Garda Síochána would simply refuse to obey instructions from the elected Government on the formation of a police reserve. So if this is how a police trade union behaves, what do you expect from republican thugs, especially if allowed, thanks to grotesque mismanagement by senior Garda officers, to have access to a building site, aka a missile factory? The day after the centre of Dublin was taken by fascist greenshirts (but then reconquered by brave individual gardaí, the primary reason the force still retains some respect) we heard a senior Garda officer, Alan McHugh, declare that there had been no intelligence that there would be trouble.
But the gathering of intelligence on enemies of the State is not a primary duty of a police force; it is the primary duty. Moreover, Saoirse, Republican Sinn Féin's Die Sturmer, had actually called for demonstrations against the march. So with such a sublime intellect in charge of the defence of the capital, is it any wonder that hooligans were able to seize and hold its centre for several hours? Naturally, there will be no resignations over this debacle.
The gravity of the situation can scarcely be exaggerated. We can now all wave farewell to any hope of a peaceful marching season in the North - for why now should loyalists accept re-routing at Garvaghy Road or at Holy Cross in Ardoyne or at Derry's walls, when the families of victims of IRA violence were prevented from marching down the capital's main street by fascist greenshirts? Those would-be marchers were not loyalist coat-trailers, but mostly decent, law-abiding Irish men and women who have lost loved ones to republican terrorism. And they are the very people whom the peace process has studiously ignored, even as it has rewarded killers and cut-throats with rounds of golf at the K Club and visits to the Áras.
Saturday's anti-Protestant riots cannot be taken in isolation, for they are a reminder that ours remains a deeply sectarian society. How else would the rioters know that the RTÉ journalist Charlie Bird was a Protestant, and accordingly beat the bejasus out of him? Worse still, it reflects a broader political culture which actually reveres the principle of violence, even as it sanitises the actual practice of it into pious, meaningless abstractions: green juju. And to judge from the recent and wretched seminar on 1916 at UCC, we even have an academic class which does the same: jujuologists.
Thus, "constitutional" republicanism has invented pacifist violence, death-free killing, destruction with no damage, and wounds that don't hurt.
Which is fine and dandy: except that somewhere out there in the undergrowth of our housing estates prowl the feral forms of Sinn Féin which regard the real violence and the real killing of 1916 as the ideal behavioural template. They don't pore over the details of the Proclamation like Talmudic scholars: for them, Easter 1916 is not about fine words, but lethal deeds.
And they're right. You can't seriously claim the allegiance of people as you kill them, which is what the authors of the meaningless Proclamation did to the unarmed police and civilians of Dublin. Wriggle as they might, this is something which none of the blustering, letter-writing casuists who defend the Rising in this paper can deny.
Forty years after the last giddy commemoration of the Rising kick-started the Troubles into life, the Government is organising yet another military parade on exactly the same uncritical and celebratory lines as 1966. "Oh we're all off to Dublin in the Green, in the Green. . ." And 3,700 people have not been killed in the meantime.
Ah, but the peace process has changed everything, say the peace processeers. Has it? So what has this peace process achieved? After last Saturday, with all three republican terrorist groups involved in the mayhem, don't say peace. Meanwhile, we have corrupted our political institutions, north and south, to accommodate killers, racketeers and bank-robbers: the mafira. And with the British army stretched thin across the globe, and the PSNI nearly broken by O'Loanian political correctness, God help us all this coming marching season.