Irreducibility of the space of dihedral covers of the projective line of a given numerical type

We show in this paper that the set of irreducible components of the family of Galois coverings of P^1_C with Galois group isomorphic to D_n is in bijection with the set of possible numerical types. In this special case the numerical type is the equivalence class (for automorphisms of D_n) of the function which to each conjugacy class $\mathcal{C}$ in D_n associates the number of branch points whose local monodromy lies in the class $\mathcal{C}$.