A church bell tolled for each of the 11 emigrants from a County Mayo parish who drowned about the RMS Titanic yesterday.

The Irish ceremony marked the 98th anniversary of the ships sinking.

The bell rang at St Patrick’s church, Lahardane County Mayo, at 2.20 a.m., the estimated time the ocean liner sank after it hit an iceberg off Newfoundland’s Grand Banks on April 15th, 1912.



Three of the 14 emigrants from Addergoole parish were saved, and a granddaughter of Delia McDermott (31), one of the three survivors, traveled to the parish from New Jersey in the US a week ago.

The tiny County Mayo village of Lahardane is the only place in Europe where the ship’s sinking is marked every year during the very hour when 1,517 people on board perished.



The bell was rung by descendants of those lost and pupils from three nearby parish national schools attended the 2 a.m. to 3 a.m. ceremony, which also included recitations, poetry and music.



A new book on the Titanic sinking published this week claims that no distress signal was sent from the world’s largest passenger ship for at least three-quarters of an hour after it struck ice.



Critical time was spent assessing the damage from the iceberg when nearby ships could have been steaming to the rescue, according to Tim Maltin, author of '101 Things You Thought You Knew About the Titanic... But Didn’t.'



Captain Edward Smith may have been an experienced seaman, but he was not used to that size of ship, which was said to have been steaming at about 22 knots when the fatal collision occurred.