SUN. FEBRUARY 2, 1997: A parade of approximately 40,000 people marched in dignified procession in the city of Derry to honour the 25th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday Martyrs.
MON. FEBRUARY 3, 1997: The IRA prisoners who give their allegiance to the Continuity Army Council were moved from Limerick prison, where they have been incarcerated since January 1996, to Portlaoise prison.
A 79-year-old independent nationalist councillor on Banbridge District Council, Larry McCartan, suffered a heart attack and died after being forced to flee his home at Laurencetown, Co Armagh because of a bomb hoax perpetuated by a loyalist death squad. Calls had been made to the Samaritans warning that "mid-Ulster loyalists" had planted bombs at Laurencetown, Obins Street, Portadown, Co Armagh and Hilltown, Co Down.
WED. FEBRUARY 5, 1997: The Governor of Limerick prison admitted, in an interview on Radio Limerick, that the conditions for women prisoners in the jail are the "worst we have" as details were revealed of the cage-like structure in which the women have to exercise.
THURS. FEBRUARY 6, 1997: More than twenty nationalist homes in the Lenadoon, New Barnsley, Ballymurphy and Falls areas of Belfast were raided by the RUC British police. Eight men were arrested in the raids. During the raids floor-boards were pulled up and holes knocked in walls and ceilings. Doors were smashed, windows broken and fireplaces wrecked in some of the homes.
SAT. FEBRUARY 8, 1997: A force of 400 British paramilitary police and over 80 Land-Rovers looked on as 2,000 loyalists, with eleven bands playing sectarian music, terrorised mass-goers in the village of Harryville, Ballymena, Co Antrim.
There are 262,400 people out of work in the 26 Counties.
MON. FEBRUARY 10, 1997: The mother of Peter McBride, shot dead in Belfast by British soldiers in 1992, has criticised a new campaign, headed by the men's MPs and senior members of the military, including David Scott-Barrett, a former general officer commanding in Scotland, to release the two Scots Guards, James Fisher and Mark Douglas Wright, convicted for killing him.
Stormont minister John Wheeler said that the Casement Three are due to be told in the next couple of weeks if their case is being referred to the court of appeal after the Six-County direct-ruler Patrick Mayhew had examined a submission on the case of the three men who were found guilty of the killing of two British army corporals in 1988.
TUES. FEBRUARY 11, 1997: Amnesty International issued an international Urgent Action alert on behalf of Róisín McAliskey. The appeal was issued by Amnesty's US-based specialist for Britain and Ireland, Kathleen Kavanagh.
WED. FEBRUARY 12, 1997: The badly-decomposed body of Whitemoor prison warder Peter Curran, who had been suspended from Whitemoor six months after the attempted escape by five Irish political prisoners and one other prisoner from the prison, was pulled from a river in Cambridgeshire, England, two years after he went missing. The body was strapped into the driver's seat of a car.
A 19-year-old east Belfastman claimed that the RUC British police attempted to turn him into an informer when he went to Mountpottinger RUC barracks to make a complaint about a personal matter.
A British soldier was shot dead in south Armagh. The soldier was killed with a single shot by a sniper as he operated a checkpoint at Green Road, Bessbrook, south Armagh at around 6.30pm.
The memorial to IRA Volunteers Seán Sabhat and Feargal O'Hanlon, killed during an attack on British Crown Forces in 1957, was attacked for the third time, when paint was splashed on it by loyalists.
The number of people unemployed in the Six Counties is 70,800.
THURS. FEBRUARY 13, 1997: Lurganman Paul Gillespie (34) was the victim of a vicious assault from members of the British Occupation Force's Royal Irish Regiment while he was making his way to his mother-in-law's house on the nationalist Kilwilkie estate.
A Catholic woman who appeared on a television programme about the blockade by Orange triumphalists at Harryville church had a window in her home smashed a short time after the broadcast.
Róisín McAliskey, who is in her seventh month of pregnancy, was refused bail and remanded for four weeks in custody at Bow Street magistrates court in London.
SAT. FEBRUARY 15, 1997: Patrick Mayhew, British supremo in the Occupied Six Counties, speaking on BBC Radio Ulster, said an apology would be "unjust" to those who had taken part. He went on to assert that "an apology was for criminal wrongdoing and there is nothing in the Widgery Report to support that".
A new loyalist group – the County Antrim Orange Support Movement – was set up at an inaugural rally in the Protestant Hall, Ballymena, Co Antrim and called on loyalists to adopt an uncompromising position during the marching season.
THURS. FEBRUARY 20, 1997: The home of an eight-month pregnant nationalist woman, Karen McVicker and her four-year-old daughter, was attacked by petrol-bombers in Coleraine, County Derry.
FRI. FEBRUARY 21, 1997: Three men, who served 19 years in British prisons for murder were released on February 21 when the British judiciary admitted to another 'miscarriage of justice'. Cousins Michael (35) and Vincent (42) Hickey, James Robinson (63) and a fourth, Patrick Molloy, were jailed in 1979 for the killing of delivery boy Carl Bridgewater (13) who was shot in the head after apparently disturbing burglars at an isolated Staffordshire farmhouse the previous year. The investigation into the killing was carried out by the West Midlands British police, the same force which interrogated the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four.
SAT. FEBRUARY 22, 1997: A conference on Irish Republicanism entitled "Irish Freedom: Reform or Revolution" took place in the Guildhall in Derry sponsored by the local Sean Keenan/Tommy Toner Cumann of Republican Sinn Féin. The conference was addressed by Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and Fr Des Wilson, Belfast, and attended by more than a hundred people.
SUN. FEBRUARY 23, 1997: Nationalists resident in the mainly loyalist area of the Waterside in Derry came under an onslaught of Orange terror when several hundred loyalists went on the rampage, throwing bottles, stones and other missiles at their nationalist neighbours. Nationalist homes were petrol-bombed and violent attacks perpetrated on individuals caught unawares. The riot spilled over into the casualty unit of Altnagelvin Hospital where staff were assaulted by the drunken loyalists as they tried to administer to the wounded.
MON. FEBRUARY 24, 1997:
The relatives of those killed in bombings by loyalist death squads in Dublin and Monaghan in 1974 brought their fight a stage further in the Dublin High Court by demanding that police commissioner Pat Byrne release secret police files on the atrocities.
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