GARDAÍ have arrested a man in his fifties following the discovery of a car bomb in the car park of a hotel in Dublin.
Hundreds of guests of the Finnstown Country House Hotel in Lucan were evacuated on Saturday night after the alarm was raised.
A 55-year-old man has been detained at Lucan Garda Station under Section 30 of the Offences Against the State Act, 1939. He is currently being questioned and can be held until Wednesday when Gardaí will have to decide whether to charge him or not.
The suspect is believed to be from Belfast originally and is reported to have known links to dissident republicanism.
Police received a 999 call at around 8:40pm on Saturday raising concerns about what might be inside a car parked outside the hotel.
An Army Bomb Squad team was then called to the scene, with guests evacuated at around 10:30pm.
The bomb disposal experts made the device safe and guests were allowed back inside the hotel in the early hours of Sunday morning.
Media reports said the device, a fertiliser bomb, was discovered in a milk churn in a car with Northern Ireland registration plates. It was described as viable but not primed.
It is not known what its intended target was, whether it was in transit or whether it had been left at the hotel car park for collection.
It was seized just hours before the climax of the high-profile Giro d’Italia cycling race, which was broadcast to 125 million households worldwide.
