As the assistant purser of the Leinster, Bill Sweeney, drifted from his life in 1979, did he wonder how the fate which had befallen his vessel 61 years previously had been so totally forgotten in Ireland?
To be sure, he had recently been interviewed by some young fellow - what was his name? Whelan, was it? - about the catastrophe, but otherwise, no one cared. Hundreds of people coldly massacred within sight of Kingstown, yet the country from which they had sailed had forgotten them.
The amnesia was total, perhaps because it was voluntary. It is possible to eradicate public recollection of an event by massive coercion, such as that practised in the Soviet Union. This used terror to prevent people speaking of a famine or a massacre, yet still they whispered what they knew to their children by the fireside. The hearth became the guardian of the truth. But there is another form of amnesia, which is consensual and altogether more compelling, and it was employed in Ireland. It used the social tools of schooling, disapproval and taboo to prevent anyone questioning the emerging national narrative. To remember, even privately, was to betray the new State.
Thus the sinking of the Leinster with the loss of 500 lives, one of the cruellest and most needless acts of the first World War, was consigned to the historical waste-bin.
Irish history books ignored it. Germany - after all - had been the acclaimed "gallant allies" of the Easter Proclamation. The act was forgotten, so were the dead, and so too were the survivors. Declan Whelan alone had thought to take down Bill Sweeney's recollections. The Leinster had gone from public memory, for all time.
Well, not quite. No doubt had it been left to various governments, all memory of everything not associated with the Golden Thread of history, linking the Fenians with today, would have been forgotten. But amongst those killed were postal workers in the mail-room, and their union remembered them. And there were a few inconvenient individuals, who would consult old newspapers and would ask: How could such a monstrosity be forgotten? How could the sacks of Cork and Balbriggan, in which deaths numbered perhaps three or four, become almost declarations of national martyrdom, to be recited by every child in the land, yet this cold-blooded and deliberate massacre of hundreds could be totally eradicated from public memory? Even today, when we profess to be able to take a broader view of our history than that created by three quarters of a century of schooled-amnesia, there are those who find mitigation for the sinking of the Leinster, because it carried soldiers. But the U-boat skipper could not have known that - and no rules of war permitted the no-warning sinking of a civilian mail-ship containing large numbers of civilians. Had a brace of British torpedoes taken so many Irish lives, the east coat of Ireland would have developed a serious list with the memorials to the victims.
There is but one memorial in Dún Laoghaire, erected by the postal workers' union, and now another, and perhaps more important one, has just appeared: Philip Lecane's account of the tragedy, Torpedoed! The RMS Leinster Disaster. It is perhaps a melancholy reflection on Irish interest in the Leinster that Philip's book has not been produced by an Irish publisher, but by Periscope Publishing of Penzance in Cornwall.
There are tales here too terrible for contemplation, such as that of Essie Gould from Limerick, who boarded the Leinster with her entire family, en route to visit their father, a former soldier now working in a munitions factory in England. Possibly the good wages available in the industry enabled him to pay for the journey to their doom. His wife, Catherine Gould, was accompanied by her children, Michael, Essie, Alice, Angela and Olive, aged between one year to 20. All were lost, save Essie.
How did she and her father console one another over the years ahead; and did they find anyone at home remotely interested in the unspeakable fate which war had reserved for them? And how long before Tralee forgot its Leinster dead? Four girls from the town, Chrissie Murphy, Lizzie Healy, and sisters Lena and Norah Galvin, were lost in the mailboat: were they as swiftly abolished from the Kerry memory as the two Black and Tans who were thrown alive into the gas-making furnace in the town three years later? But no act of amnesia was required to abolish all memory of poor Robert Palmer. He was a cripple, a word no longer in vogue, but it probably adequately describes him. Disabled from infancy with a spinal injury, he was on his way from the Cripples Home in Bray to Barnardo's in London, and never stood a chance. He is truly forgotten, for his name did not even appear on the official list of the dead.
And then there are John McCormack's nephews and nieces, 10 of them: their parents, Thomas and Charlotte, were lost on the Leinster. What became of these 10 orphans down the coming decades? And did the great Irish tenor help them financially? It is not the narratives which a society tells which define it so much as the tales it does not tell. We have scuffed over the unmarked graves of history's inconvenient dead, and coughed to hide the sound of our shoes.
Yet every now and then, a torch shines in history's darkness, and suddenly, in the dungeon of their exile, the serried eyes of the forgotten stare up with gratitude. Philip has lit such a torch, and it is one to break your heart.