DUBLIN, Ireland (AP) – Several hundred Irish Republican Army supporters opposed to a Protestant march in Dublin attacked police for several hours Saturday, bringing damage and danger to Ireland’s normally peaceful capital.

In riotous scenes rarely seen in the Republic of Ireland, protesters hurled bottles, bricks, concrete blocks and fireworks at police as they tried to clear the hostile crowd from Dublin’s most famous boulevard, O’Connell Street. Even though the Protestants abandoned their parade, the street battles kept spreading to streets near the national parliament and museums, as well as a shopping center and the major tourist district, Temple Bar.

The Garda Siochana, Ireland’s national police force, said 14 people – six officers and eight civilians, among them rioters and a journalist – were hospitalized, mostly with head wounds. More than a dozen other people suffered less serious injuries. The police advised shoppers and tourists to avoid the entire city center, which is normally packed with pedestrian traffic on Saturdays.

Officers in full riot gear – helmets, shields and clubs – arrested at least 37 protesters as a police surveillance plane circled overhead.

The protesters, mostly young men covering their faces with scarves, chanted pro-IRA slogans as they waged running battles with riot police and other officers on horseback, forcing shops on several streets to close.

Afterward, O’Connell Street was littered with broken paving stones and glass from shattered shop windows.

Near Leinster House, Ireland’s parliament building, at least three cars were overturned and set ablaze, while windows on scores of cars and businesses were smashed.

The Irish government, in a gesture of reconciliation, had granted permission for Protestant hard-liners from the “Love Ulster” campaign to parade through Dublin. It would have been the first parade by pro-British Protestants south of the border since Ireland’s partition into a mostly Protestant north and mostly Catholic south in 1921.

However the would-be marchers, who came accompanied by traditional bands of fife and drum, instead traveled by bus to the besieged parliamentary building.

Prime Minister Bertie Ahern said Protestant “unionists,” who favor Northern Ireland’s union with Britain, should have enjoyed freedom to demonstrate their views.

“There is absolutely no excuse for the disgraceful scenes in Dublin today,” Ahern said. “It is the essence of Irish democracy and republicanism that people are allowed to express their views freely and in a peaceful manner.”

Protestant leaders praised police efforts to protect them, but nonetheless handed a letter of protest to Justice Minister Michael McDowell during a meeting inside Leinster House.

One Protestant politician, Democratic Unionist Party lawmaker Jeffrey Donaldson, said most of the rioters had traveled to Dublin from Catholic areas of Northern Ireland.

“We have received a warm welcome from ordinary Dubliners,” Donaldson said. “But it’s clear these republicans have come from north of the border and other areas intent only on causing trouble.”

McDowell blamed the violence on “an organized mob who came to Dublin with the intention of deliberately creating mayhem in a peaceful and prosperous city.”

“The only message these people have managed to convey to the people of Dublin and of Ireland is that sectarian violence is, once again, being unleashed against all of the principles of the Good Friday agreement and the overwhelming wishes of the Irish people,” McDowell said, referring to the 1998 peace accord for Northern Ireland.

Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, whose IRA-linked party represents most Catholics in Northern Ireland but is less popular in the Irish Republic, said he had called on supporters to ignore the Protestants’ parade plan “and not to be provoked by it.”

“Regrettably a small, unrepresentative group chose to ignore our appeal. Their actions were entirely wrong and reprehensible,” Adams said.

The “Love Ulster” campaign is led by Willie Frazer, several of whose relatives were killed by the modern IRA.

The IRA in 1970 launched a campaign to force Northern Ireland out of the United Kingdom. The outlawed group killed about 1,775 people and maimed thousands more before calling a 1997 cease-fire.