Remarks at the Titanic Centenary National Tribute
Cobh, 11th April 2012
Mayor Quinlan, Ladies and Gentlemen:
I wish to thank Cobh Town Council for inviting me to participate in this solemn and very appropriate centenary commemoration. As we gather here, we are mindful of how RMS Titanic arrived at Cobh, her final port of embarkation on her inaugural trans-Atlantic crossing. This great liner, renowned as a triumph of engineering even before entering into service, departed exactly one hundred years ago today over a grey horizon to meet with disaster and to attain a unique position in maritime history.
The tragic sinking of the Titanic, in 1912, left an indelible mark on the generation who heard of its sinking. The Belfast Evening Telegraph was one of the first newspapers to report on the unfolding tragedy. Its headlines ran as follows:
“The Titanic Sinking; Collision with Iceberg; Disastrous Maiden Voyage; Women Removed to Lifeboats; Liners Hastening to the Rescue; Wireless Messages Come To Abrupt Termination; Over 2,000 Souls on Board.”
While there has been a long history of shipping disasters before and indeed since, Titanic has caught the imagination of that and subsequent generations in a manner that is perhaps unrivalled.
What is it about this story that reaches us today across the generations? It is a story of genius and industry, achievement and pride, romance and tragedy, hope and despair, courage and cowardice, responsibility and negligence, loss and redemption. It is the stuff of myth and legend but it also actually happened.
The year in which it happened was also a powerful context that affected the Titanic’s story and it is a matter for congratulations to all those involved in making a new circumstance of peace on our island that we can return to the Titanic and reflect on its story. The Belfast in which Titanic was built was a city brimming with self-confidence, proud of its industrial pre-eminence and very self-conscious of its perceived distinctiveness from the rest of the island. For its unionist community, the sinking of the Titanic and the concurrent publication of the Third Home Rule Bill created a crisis of psychological confidence and political insecurity and it’s unfolding deeply impacted on the subsequent history of our island.
Time may have dimmed the harrowing grief caused to the bereaved after some 1,500 people were lost to the icy waters. 100 years on those victims still occupy a special place in our hearts. Some of this can be explained by the fact that while we can identify with some of them who had dreams and hopes for the future, we are curious about others whom the Titanic was transporting.
However, the reasons for our fascination with Titanic are more than our empathy with its victims. It also has to do with the sobering wisdom painfully acquired from the hubris that characterised the story. Titanic happened in an age of belief and expectation that technology and innovation were transforming mankind. One of the icons of that age of modernity was the transatlantic liner and the world waited for three years for Belfast to bring forth a nautical dream. 3,000 men were engaged in building it and, when it was completed, RMS Titanic was the Ship of Dreams.
It was a feat of engineering reflecting the gargantuan steps that had taken place in engineering and technology over the preceding decades. Presented as sophisticated and opulent for a monied class, it was the largest luxury liner to grace the open seas. It boasted accommodation we associate with modern day luxury liners and its magnificence created an unparalleled sense of wonderment and exhilaration. In the lower decks, where the majority of passengers were, the conditions were described as safer than what earlier waves of emigrants experienced.
During the years Titanic was being constructed, its state of the art technology and engineering was associated in the public perception with the advancement of progress and improvement in social life. Within a few short years, that same technology and engineering were focused on manufacturing the sinews of war. The same technological capability that bestowed the Dream of Titanic was subsequently used to generate the Nightmare of the Great War – a war that created casualties on an industrial scale and shattered any assumption that advancing technology and human progress were ineluctably linked.
Tragically, what started out with Titanic as a potent symbol of technological innovation, comfort, safety, pride and invincibility quickly became a ship of death, ruin and shattered dreams. While the very high standards of design and engineering for Titanic had brought the perception of ‘unsinkability’ into common use, the descent itself stands as a reminder of the human price paid for failure to achieve a universal or classless access to safety. With room for 2,453 passengers: 833 first class; 64 second class and 1,006 third class the Titanic had, 1,178 lifeboat spaces of which 729 were filled when disaster struck. Given that some of the lifeboats were not filled; that over 60 per cent of the first class passengers survived while 38 per cent of the third class passengers survived – I am quoting from Fintan O’Toole’s excellent article at the weekend in the Irish Times – one can see that the design of the shop and the provisions for safety rejected the values of a class-divided society.
Nevertheless those in the Steerage – European migrants to the U.S. including some Irish – would have contrasted their relative comfort in comparison to other crowed decks, often disease-ridden conditions that prevailed in the ships of earlier decades that carried their relatives.
Of those who perished 700 were crew and it is these and the steerage passengers who died as a result of the chaos and the absence of provision of an equal means of survival.
We in our time have experienced the sense of crisis that occurs when something deemed unsinkable – in our case a speculative economy – is confounded not only by circumstance and error but by the hubris that accompanied belief in what proved to be an irrational version of the economic. In addition to those who are materially impacted by the crisis, it leads to a collective loss of confidence, a questioning of previously unchallenged assumptions and an erosion of trust in institutions. In the humbling aftermath of that crisis there is not only an opportunity to learn but a requirement to reflect – to address the errors and the erroneous assumptions that led to failure, to mobilise support around an alternative vision for our Republic and to put ourselves on course for a future that is sustainable and embraces us all as equal citizens.
It was through a terrible combination of errors and circumstances that the fatal chain of events developed for Titanic. With the loss of Captain Smith and despite British and American Inquiries, we can never know to what extent over-confidence, ambition or negligence may have led to disaster. The elements of tragedy abound in the records of small things, insignificant at the time, but terrible in their cumulative effect. The elements of tragedy resonate in the accounts of the missing binoculars, the inadequate use of the new radio communications and above all the handling and filling of lifeboats. The response too, in the aftermath of the tragedy, in caring for the families of those who were lost and the survivors is a chilling indictment of a lack of corporate ethics and compassion.
The disaster occurred of course in the time of the second wave of post-Famine emigration to North America. Between 1830 and 1914, it is estimated that 5 million Irish people left for North America - never to return. Our emigrants helped to build many great American cities - their canals, roads and railways – and they quickly became an organised political force within that society. Only 12 years before the tragedy, the census showed 2.2% of the US population were Irish born. And many thousands of those emigrants departed Ireland from here - the port of Queenstown.
A ship such as the Titanic made trans-Atlantic travel a tolerable and, if you had the money, a very pleasant experience by the standards of the time. Like so many before them, over 100 Irish passengers boarded the Titanic at Cobh. It is estimated that just 39 survived. Anna Kelly was one - she’d come up on deck to see what was happening and managed to make her way to lifeboat 16. Catherine Burke of North Mayo, who was on her way to Chicago, was not so lucky. Neither was Margaret Rice from Athlone nor her five sons. Of the Lahardane group of fourteen, eleven perished and their memory is celebrated sensitively by their parish community of origin in Mayo. All of these personal tragedies were compounded for their families by the fact that most bodies were never recovered.
The Jesuit priest Frank Browne – who took some of the best surviving photographs of the Titanic - was perhaps one of the fortunate passengers. Initially booked on the Southhampton to Queenstown leg of the journey, he was befriended on board by a wealthy American couple who offered to pay his full passage to New York. His request to his Provincial to continue on to America met with a terse telex response – “Get off that Ship” – and this probably saved his life.
Compelling and deeply shocking, the Titanic’s fate has inspired books, documentaries and films like no other disaster. Legends have grown around it. Scientists have explored it. Theories have evolved around it. People have become obsessed. That obsession and the passage of time have led to a certain romanticisation of the Titanic story. It is noteworthy that an early attempt at spinning the news is revealed in the early reports of loss which laid heavy stress on the heroic courage of the officers, crew and some passengers in meeting with catastrophe. George Bernard Shaw drew much criticism as, with a cold eye, he reflected on why the national response to the disaster was not grief or sympathy or prayer, but an “explosion of outrageous romantic lying”. Shaw is reported as asking:
“What is the use of all this ghastly, blasphemous, inhuman, braggartly lying? Here is a calamity which might well make the proudest man humble and the wildest joker serious. It makes us vainglorious, insolent and mendacious.”
Shaw’s perspective on the Titanic, and also that of Joseph Conrad, were no doubt influenced by their humanist sympathies and neither do we do justice to the memory of the some 1,500 people who died by enveloping the story in a warm glow of nostalgia. We best honour their memory by telling the story of the Titanic as truthfully as we can, respecting its historical complexity, acknowledging that it captures the full spectrum of human experience and human fallibility and making a reflection of what it tells us – of the power of the sea; of the price of hubris; of the human cost of the class system; and of the universal right to safety.
I congratulate Cobh Town Council for organising a programme of events throughout the year that will enable the Titanic story to be explored and examined in all its aspects. The people of Cobh also deserve great credit for the dignified manner in which they have respected the memory of the victims of the Lusitania in May 1915 – both through the maintenance of the Old Church graveyard and the construction of the Jerome O’Connor monument in Casement Square.
The story of Titanic, her construction, her short life and tragic loss, will be carried forward for many generations. It is because it is a very human story. It is rooted in our instinct for advancement and progress. It illustrates the limits of human endeavour and the overwhelming forces of nature which we ignore at our peril. As a story of the modern industrial age, it is very well documented. We can know almost all of what happened and yet, for so many parts of the story, we are left to reflect on why it was so.
Today, after 100 years, it is right that we take time to remember the departure of the Titanic from our shores and her rendezvous with a very tragic fate. We remember with respect all those who died on the Titanic and the thousands more whose lives were devastated by the loss of their loved ones in the Atlantic. We reflect on what it teaches us about the inherent fragility of human life in the face of nature, the folly of over-weaning material ambition and the need to be ever mindful that, irrespective of their social distinctions as passengers, the only classification on the Titanic that ultimately mattered was whether one was a victim or survivor. In the end, it is always about our shared vulnerability and our shared humanity and whether during our lives we add or subtract to the quality of our community and society.
Thank you for your kind attention.