UCC conference puts spotlight on Lusitania

Historian Gabriel Doherty outlines impacts of the Lusitania sinking, due to be analysed at a seminar in UCC; the following pages feature articles by other conference speakers

Following (but perhaps not solely as a result of) a successful torpedo strike by the u-boat U20, the RMS Lusitania sank off the Old Head of Kinsale on May 7, 1915, with the loss of 1,198 passengers and crew — the precise figure is sometimes disputed, but this number represents a broad consensus.

It was not the first passenger ship to be lost at sea, for memories of the sinking of the Titanic, a smidgen over three years before, were surely still fresh in the minds of many of those who were part of, saw, or later heard of, the catastrophe that played itself out a few miles off the coast of Cork that spring morning.