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January 31

Published in On this Day listing

1984 Ann Lovett (15) died while giving birth near a Marian grotto in Granard, Co. Longford.
1953 The Princess Victoria, an early roll-on–roll-off ferry, en route from Stranraer to Larne, sank in hurricane-force conditions off Belfast Lough, with the loss of 133 lives. It was Ireland’s worst peacetime maritime disaster.
1917 Germany announced unrestricted submarine warfare.
1913 Having pledged to use ‘all means which may be found necessary’ to stop Home Rule, the Ulster Unionist Council formally inaugurated the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). Up to 100,000 enlisted.

On this Day

1971 Annette McGavigan (14) was shot dead, apparently by a British soldier, during an exchange of fire between troops and the IRA in Derry’s Bogside. She was the 100th victim of Northern Ireland’s violence since 1969.
1970 A new trial of Charles J. Haughey and three others on charges of conspiring to import arms and ammunition to the Republic opened. All four were found not guilty on 23 October.
1998 RUC Constable Frank O’Reilly (30), a Catholic, died from injuries sustained in a loyalist blast-bomb attack in Portadown a month earlier, the last of 303 members of the RUC to die in the Northern Ireland Troubles.
1962 Sylvia Beach, publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses, died.
1891 Charles Stewart Parnell died.
1810 Donnchadh Rua Mac Con Mara (aged c. 95), poet, notably of the exile-poem Bánchnoic Éireann Óighe and the humorous Eachtra Ghiolla an Amaráin, died.
1972 Sinn Féin’s Kevin Street, Dublin, HQ was closed down by gardaí under the Offences Against the State Act.