THE SINKING of the Lusitania was remembered in Cobh, Co Cork, yesterday with prayers, music and the laying of wreaths.
The number of people drowned in the sinking of the Lusitania on May 7th, 1915, totalled 1,198, including 128 Americans and 39 children under the age of two.
The liner was en route from New York to Liverpool when a single torpedo penetrated its hull just below the waterline.
Members of Cobh Tourism organised yesterday's ceremony which involved music from St Colman's Pipe Band and wreath-laying ceremonies at the Lusitania Peace Memorial in Casement Square and the Old Church graveyard.
The monument to the Lusitania was erected 13 years ago at the Old Head of Kinsale to mark the 80th anniversary of the tragedy.
Yesterday's parade was led by the Organisation of Irish National Ex-Servicemen and Women and representatives of the Royal Navy Association.
Cobh Tourism chairman Hendrick Verwey described the event as being a "fitting memorial" to all those who lost their lives on the voyage.
The Old Church graveyard in Cobh contains the remains of 193 passengers who died in the tragedy. Of those, 45 were unidentified and their coffins merely marked with a number.
Meanwhile, British woman Audrey Lawson-Johnston (93) is the last living survivor of the sinking. Mrs Lawson-Johnston, was just a baby when the passenger liner was torpedoed off the Irish coast by a German U-boat in 1915.
Her two sisters died, although her brother and parents were also saved. Mrs Lawson-Johnston's nanny was another of the victims. She drowned - but not before grabbing baby Audrey from her cot and rushing her to one of the liner's crowded lifeboats.
The survival craft left a lasting impression on Mrs Lawson-Johnston and her mother Amy Lea Pearl, who both went on to donate a great deal of time and money to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution.
In 2004, Mrs Lawson-Johnston raised £26,000 which paid for a new lifeboat stationed in Newquay.
Last month, Barbara McDermott of Connecticut, the last but one survivor of the Lusitania disaster, died.
As Barbara Anderson, she was a month short of her third birthday and on her way to visit her grandmother in England when the liner was torpedoed.
Ms Anderson, who had been eating lunch with her mother, had been ushered into a lifeboat and survived, together with 747 others.