This week marks 113 years since the world’s most famous ship, the Titanic, went under in 1912 with the loss of over 100 Irish lives.
It is estimated that some 110 victims from Ireland were amongst the 1,517 dead on board the stricken vessel. The tragedy reached across Ireland with the death toll directly affecting 22 counties. There were deaths of people from Antrim, Armagh, Cavan, Clare, Cork, Donegal, Down, Dublin, Fermanagh, Galway, Kerry, Kildare, Limerick, Longford, Mayo, Roscommon, Sligo, Tipperary, Waterford, Westmeath, Wexford and Wicklow.
The world’s largest ocean liner was designed by Irishman Alexander Montgomery Carlisle, from Ballymena in Antrim. It was struck by an iceberg close to midnight on April 14, 1912, and quickly went down in the dark, freezing waters of the North Atlantic Ocean, some 600 km south of Canadian province Newfoundland, in the early hours of the morning.
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The ship, which was heralded worldwide as impenetrable, was built in Belfast and sailed on its maiden voyage from Southampton and then Cork. Five men died during the construction of the ship at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, while only 54 Irish people survived its sinking.
Of the 110 Irish victims, as many as 14 of them - men and women – all came from Mayo village of Addergoole on their way to New York in America to build a new life. They boarded at Cobh, formerly known as Queenstown until 1922, along with others from Belfast and Cork towns Ballydesmond and Ballydehob.
Researchers also found entries for passengers like Neal McNamee from Donegal and his British wife Eileen, who died whilst celebrating their wedding of only three months earlier. Tragically, six members of one family – the Rice family from Athlone in Westmeath – died when mother Margaret and her five children sailed back to America three years after her husband died in a railway accident there.
Limerick farmer Thomas O'Brien died while his wife Johanna O'Brien Godfrey survived because women and children were the first to be evacuated as the Titanic went under at 2.20am local time on April 15, just two hours and 40 minutes after striking an iceberg at 11.40pm on April 14.
Other named Irish include Tom McCormack, who spent 80 minutes in the freezing sea. He survived and revealed that one of the crew began whacking him over the head and shoulders with a paddle as he attempted to board a lifeboat. Amazingly, he was saved when big-hearted sisters Mary and Kate Murphy, from Longford, intervened and pulled him aboard. Tom was back pulling pints at a pub in New Jersey just two weeks later with a broken heart after his cousins Philip and John Kiernan perished with the Titanic.
The Murphy sisters’ heroics are portrayed in the 1997 Hollywood blockbuster movie Titanic, starring Leonardo di Caprio and Kate Winslet, in the storyline of another survivor: Irish-American woman Margaret Tobin Brown, from Fermoy in Cork. Her real-life character, who was played in the film by Kathy Bates, became known as the “unsinkable Molly Brown” after she helped save many lives by calling for people in the water to be allowed on the lifeboats.
Another extraordinary escape story is that of Cork man Daniel Buckley, who was 21 when he survived because Madeleine Astor, the young wife of the world’s richest man, threw him a shawl to hide under as officers removed male passengers from the lifeboats. Tragically, Daniel died just six years later when he was killed by a German bullet in the Second World War, only one month before it ended.
Another famous survivor was a young priest called Fr Francis Browne, who was a keen photographer. He was aboard for one night only, sailing from Southampton to Cobh, during which time he took dozens of photographs of the Titanic’s gym, dining saloon, and passengers walking the decks.
He was able to later share his photos because, it is claimed, he was ordered to disembark in Cobh by a superior who sent a telegram that demanded he “get off that ship”. Many of the Irish had travelled in Third Class and were held there by the ship’s officers and crew until the final moments of the liner.
Katie McCarthy, from Ballygurtin in Tipperary, was said to be the second last person to get into the last lifeboat that left the Titanic. She said: “We were only just out of the way when the ship split in two and sank.” Claims by people like Katie were dismissed as lies by a British inquiry – but photographs in 1985 showed the shipwreck in two parts on the seabed.
The Titanic’s tragic tale of how it was designed by an Irishman, built in Belfast, was photographed for the last time by an Irish priest as it set off from Cork and catastrophically sank just days later within a couple of hours will be remembered worldwide this week.
Belfast City Council held its annual remembrance service in the Titanic Memorial Garden of City Hall this week, while the Addergoole Titanic Society will have its annual Mass at St Patrick’s Church in Lahardaun, near the Mayo village, from 6.30pm on April 29.
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