Deaglán de Bréadún catches the mood
THE masses are back, and this time they're angry. Just when it seemed that politics had been completely expropriated by ambitious full-time professionals with their smooth spin-doctors and slick party machines, the plain people of Ireland stepped back on to the stage and said, "We are here and we don't want this war! If you, as our elected Government, slip, slide and sloother your way into supporting it or even holding George Bush's coat, you are not acting in our name!"
The Government may have been hiding, behind the UN Security Council, behind the need to maintain US investment, behind the desire to keep the US engaged in the Northern Ireland peace process, but on Saturday a posse of 100,000 went out hunting for Bertie Ahern and Brian Cowen.
One of the more surprising aspects of the protest was this relentless focus on the role of our own Government in helping to prevent - or at least not supporting or facilitating - the impending attack on Iraq.
It wasn't just the speakers with their political agendas. Everywhere there were posters along the lines of, "Bertie has no backbone" and "Cowen and Ahern are lily-livered". A man carried a puppet with a sign that read, "Puppets against puppet government: don't give puppets a bad name." But the real surprise was the size of the crowd. The organisers predicted 20,000 and it looked as if they were deliberately underplaying it for strategic reasons - but even they were astonished at the turnout.
From 2 p.m. the area from the Parnell Monument to Coláiste Mhuire was clogged with bodies. But there was no jostling, unpleasantness or even stridency.
People of all ages were having a day out, from pensioners, through young bucks in dreadlocks, to babes in their mothers' arms or, more accurately, slingback carriers.
The chief organiser and master of ceremonies, Richard Boyd Barrett, will be hoarse for a week. As far as the Iraq issue is concerned, this young man can now make a plausible claim to be the Real Taoiseach.
Certainly there is no way that Bertie Ahern could muster a few hundred, much less a hundred thousand, for the Government's highly nuanced stance on the conflict.
Michael D. Higgins was in a state of moral and political ecstasy. All those years of fighting the good fight, ploughing a lonely furrow, and fulminating to apathetic colleagues anxious to be somewhere else had finally borne fruit. Now the people were here in their multitudes to say, "Are you right there Michael? Yes you're right!" This was not a demonstration, it was a population movement. Every half-hour, one organiser or another would exclaim in delight, "We are in Parnell Square and the crowd extends to O'Connell Bridge" or "The head of the march is at Iveagh House but the tail is at the GPO." Passions were high. Roger Cole, newly popular with senior Labour Party people now that he is campaigning on Iraq rather than the Nice Treaty, compared the US Air Force at Shannon to "snakes" who should be driven out. The Irish former UN official, Dennis Halliday, addressed the crowd like a revivalist minister preaching the anti-war message. Taking a similar tack, Dean Robert McCarthy of St Patrick's Cathedral showed he could teach Martin Luther King some tricks.
The ever-present question was, "Is Bertie listening? Is Blair taking notice? Is Bush paying attention?" Was it a case of "government of the people, by the people, for the people" or government ignoring the people, giving them the bothered ear and the two-finger sign? And what will the people do next, if that is the case?
Younger folk inquired from veteran campaigners if the march was as big as the protests against the Vietnam War, only to be told that no demo in Dublin over Vietnam was even one tenth this size.
There was poetry, good and bad, and songs from tuneful to terrible. But the most eloquent statement on The Day the World Said No came from the protester with a placard that said: "Bush, will yeh ever cop on to yerself?"