The Titanic endures in the public imagination as it gradually passes from living memory (only five survivors are still alive). She remains a poignant symbol of human folly: a ghost ship heading inexorably towards her fate at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean amid hubristic claims that she was unsinkable and did not require extra lifeboats.
In July 1998, a public memorial to the Irish victims of the Titanic was unveiled in Cobh. The memorial depicts Margaret Rice and her five sons aboard the tender America as they depart from what was then Queenstown to board the Titanic. Margaret Rice and her sons, aged between two and 10, were drowned on the night of April 14th/ 15th, 1912, when the White Star liner sank..
Senan Molony claims the Titanic "belongs to the realm of romanticism, a realm that, as ever, conceals deeper truths". Through extensive use of newspaper reports and survivors' letters home, he attempts to tell the stories of the Irish aboard the liner, the majority of them emigrants. What seems clear is that third-class passengers in steerage, including the majority of the Irish, were falsely reassured so as to keep them below decks while first and second-class passengers made use of the lifeboats. To ensure compliance, at least some gates to the upper decks were locked.
Class differences were observed not only in life, but in death. Unidentified bodies, thought to be crew or steerage, which were picked up by recovery vessels days after the Titanic had gone down were buried at sea rather than returned to land for possible identification. Bodies from other classes were packed in ice and landed in caskets.
One of the recurrent themes of the book is the sense of foreboding many of the passengers and crew experienced. Many years after the tragedy, an English survivor, Edwina Troutt, told the Boston Globe about an Irish companion on the ship named Nora Keane, who was also saved: "She came aboard at Cobh and from the moment I met her she kept moaning that the ship would never make it to New York, that we were all doomed. She drove me a little batty. Turned out she was right."
The Titanic is part of Ireland's social history. That it took so long for it to be recognised as such in the Republic is perhaps unsurprising. Born in the loyalist shipyard of Harland & Wolff, a symbol of Empire and witness to the steady flow of emigrants from these shores, she was perhaps too painful to remember.
Timothy Fanning is a freelance journalist