Editorial: Tragic loss of Titan has extra resonance in Northern Ireland

For 111 years the loss of the Titanic has been on the psyche of the people of Belfast, and indeed Ulster.

A ship, the grandest in the world, which reflected local industrial might, and which was seen to be invincible, sank on its maiden transatlantic voyage.

The ship was brilliantly constructed at Harland and Wolff, but its fate became a story of human hubris, and of man thinking that he had conquered the seas, ending in a colossal tragedy in the freezing north Atlantic.

The story of the Titanic is one that has grown rather than faded since it perished in 1912. In 1958 the classic film A Night To Remember was made, then in 1979 SOS Titanic, and in 1997 the most expensive of all, the epic Titanic by James Cameron.

The Titanic Belfast visitor attraction, which opened in the centenary year of the sinking, was the culmination of local focus on the disaster.

The whole world has been first gripped this week by the story of the five missing men who travelled down to the shipwreck, then rocked by the horror of their loss. If the tragedy has an extra resonance anywhere it is here in NI, where we have such close associations with every aspect of the Titanic story. Only weeks ago, Dr Robert Ballard, who found the Titanic in 1985, was in Belfast. .

James Cameron, director of Titanic, who visited Titanic Belfast the year it opened, last night gave this sobering assessment of the loss of the Titan submersible: “I’m struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship and yet he steamed at full speed into an ice field."

In the coming weeks and months the tragedy will be carefully examined. In the meantime we remember these five brave ocean travellers who have died at a depth of the sea so dangerous that it has been little explored.