Buswell's hotel's foyer and bar became the Irish political equivalent of a UN safe haven on Wednesday lunchtime.
A safe haven, that is, for the shaken ranks of Fianna Fáil parliamentarians.
Inside the hotel, whose side faces directly onto the Dáil, the Irish parliament, nervous-looking Fianna Fáil MPs sat around tables deep in conversation, some glancing diffidently towards the windows at the crowds beyond.
Outside, hundreds of angry civil servants held a rally in protest not only against the Irish government's decision to impose a levy to top up public sector pensions but also to express their anger over the country's financial crisis.
There were fiery speeches about "golden circles" of bankers and financiers still making millions in share deals even while the economy was disintegrating and jobs being lost on a daily basis. While the crowd's ire was mainly trained on the banks, there was also considerable hostility to the politicians, mainly Fianna Fáil, whom some opposition parties are claiming are somehow linked to some of the "golden circle" that borrowed €300m (£265m) from the troubled and now nationalised Anglo Irish Bank.
Back in Buswell's, there was a general sense of temporary relief among the Fianna Fáil backbenchers by the time lunch was over.
Brian Cowen, the taoiseach, had managed to fight off accusations of a possible link to the hated "golden circle", and while Fine Gael, the main opposition party, remains on an election footing, the threat of the government collapsing and Ireland being forced to the polls had receded.
Having survived the verbal barrage from the angry civil servants, the MPs – back in their safety zone – could look forward to returning to Leinster House, the home of the national parliament, safe in the knowledge that Cowen's coalition with the Green party was still in business.
If they had returned from the hotel to the Dáil to face the dissolution of the government, the MPs knew they would have been entering electoral meltdown territory.
An opinion poll by the Irish Times at the start of the week found that, for the first time in modern Irish history, the Labour party had overtaken Fianna Fáil.
The TNS mrbi poll had Fianna Fáil at a historic low of 22%, while Labour was at 24% and Fine Gael, led by Enda Kenny, was still ahead of all other parties on 32%.
Those embattled Fianna Fáilers who retreated into Buswell's would have known that, in the current climate of gloom, blame and fury, a general election would spell disaster for Ireland's most successful political movement.
Party strategists this week estimated that up to 40 seats could be lost if the government fell and the country had to elect a new one. The Dáil has 166 seats.
In the present political and economic crisis, the main winner this week has been the Labour leader, Eamon Gilmore.
He has been the most adept in the Dáil at articulating the Irish people's disgust over the behaviour of some in the banking sector.
On the evidence of the poll, Gilmore could return to a new parliament post election as the most powerful Labour leader since the party was founded in the early 20th century.
Yet the one crumb of comfort those nervy Fianna Fáilers cowering in Buswell's last Wednesday lunchtime were clinging to was the paradoxical thought that, while the opposition Fine Gael/Labour bloc would be certain of electoral victory, would they really want to take over running the country at this time?
The opposition parties will undoubtedly push the Cowen government as hard as they can over its handling of the recession, its past links to the bankers and the developers whose over-ambition (some would call it greed) compounded the recession, and the profligacy of the years under Bertie Ahern when Ireland was booming but failed to invest for harder times ahead.
Could an alternative government – any government – do any better given the external economic forces the republic has no control over?
The opposition, Fianna Fáil strategists believe, might prefer to wait until the worst of the recession is past but hope that the electorate's memory of the pain is still fresh in their minds, so much so that they punish Cowen's administration.
Waking up one morning, though, to find themselves in charge of the post-Celtic Tiger chaos might just be like entering yet another fresh nightmare for Kenny and Gilmore.
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