Ben Lowry: Some of the Titan sub dead were billionaires yet we only felt for their humanity

(Scroll down for other articles by Ben Lowry and link to a letter by Dermot Nesbitt on his claim of BBC bias)​

Those first editions of the world’s oldest daily newspaper do not mention the harbour area much. Many key sailings seem to have departed from Donaghadee (there is one report of a regiment of soldiers walking to the Co Down town for their embarkation for Scotland, ahead of the War of Jenkin’s Ear!). It was more than a century before the access to Belfast port would be widened and the new harbour area created on reclaimed land. That set the scene for the great shipyard, Harland and Wolff, which was established in 1861, half a century before it built the Titanic.

The tragic story of that famous liner is part of this society’s soul. When Billy Kennedy wrote on these pages on the centenary of the sinking that “it was a tragic happening that should be quietly dispatched to the archives for historians” there were supportive letters. I took a phone call from an older reader who said it was barely discussed when he was a boy, perhaps due to shame. I penned a riposte to Billy, welcoming the growing interest in the Titanic, saying that it was story that celebrated human endeavour as well as commemorated those who died when that human ingenuity tipped into arrogance.

In my half century on this planet I have seen interest in the Titanic spread to countries such as China. Now the Titanic Centre is just behind the Giant’s Causeway in NI’s list of most popular visitor attractions. I still think that if a perfect replica of the ship had been constructed, with the exact same layout and furnishings, and moored in the harbour, near to where it was built, it could have become one of the biggest tourist attractions not just in NI, but perhaps in the world.

There has been a similar debate over how to respond to the tragic story of the Titan submersible that was lost near to the Titanic shipwreck this week.

Northern Ireland has never been far from the saga. Earlier this year, Stockton Rush, the boss of OceanGate Expeditions, which made and ran the sub, visited the docks where the Titanic was built, just as Dr Robert Ballard, who in 1985 found the remains of the liner on the Atlantic seabed, made a trip to Titanic Belfast in March.

And Meanwhile, James Cameron, director the 1997 worldwide box office smash movie Titanic, a man who visited Titanic Belfast the year it opened, has implicitly criticised Mr Rush: “A number of the top players in the deep submergence engineering community [said] that what they were doing was too experimental to carry passengers and they needed to be certified. So 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 ... and many people died as a result”.

The controversy over the sea worthiness of the submersible will rage for many years to come. There has been another controversy too, over the level of media attention given to the deaths of billionaires, and also over the appropriateness of billionaires being able to make such a £250,000 underwater journey. The Irish leftwing commentator Vincent Browne tweeted that “the media obsession with the Titanic submersible is in contrast with the relative meagre coverage of the drownings in the Mediterranean Sea”. The English leftist commentator Ash Sarkar tweeted: “If the super-rich can spend £250,000 on vanity jaunts 2.4 miles beneath the ocean then they're not being taxed enough.”

But interest in such a story is vastly greater when people are still alive (as was thought in this case) and have a rapidly shrinking amount of time in which to be saved than when they are already dead, hence the global interest in the trapped 2010 Chilean miners and the 2018 trapped Thai cave boy footballers. When it seemed this week that the five men were still alive in the sub and running out of oxygen, I thought of how terrified I would now be, a man in his 50s, trapped in such a cramped vessel as hope of rescue faded, let alone the hellish blind panic I would have felt at Suleman Dawood’s age of 19.

It is true that we mostly pay little attention to migrant deaths, but we would also know nothing about it if five wealthy Texans died in a car crash tomorrow. However, when a migrant story cuts through it will generate huge interest – I was in Lesbos in 2015 reporting on the refugee crisis when the world was stopped by images of the drowned migrant boy washed up on the beach of the nearby Greek island of Kos.

In such criticism there is a subtext of resentment of billionaires. A slight resentment of the ultra rich is normal – TV soaps like Dallas and Dynasty thrived on it. But unless we move beyond taxation to wealth confiscation, some people will be able to afford very rare exploratory experiences, which are rationed by cost (or else millions of people would be trying to visit the Titanic remains).

But I believe that billionaires, whatever their flaws, are often the people who become most aware of the limitations of money. As the tech tycoons Steve Jobs and Paul Allen found out, who died of cancer in their 50s and 60s, it can’t buy health if you are terminally ill. It also can’t buy time, it can’t buy love, esteem, family, friendship, etc. I have been reporting on royals for decades, and increasingly I think that living in a palace is no compensation for the drudgery of what they (typically without complaint) have to spend their lives doing.

But the use of wealth to buy risky but extraordinary adventures more seems more admirable to me than using it to buy a Lamborghini.

The beaming, poignant photographs above remind me of the shared humanity of even the super rich.

• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter deputy editor

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