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The most immediate catastrophe occurred off County Cork. On 7 May the German submarine U-20 torpedoed the Cunard liner RMS Lusitania south of the Old Head of Kinsale. The ship had sailed from New York for Liverpool and sank rapidly. About 1,198 passengers and crew died, although totals in contemporary and later accounts vary slightly as the identities of victims and survivors were established. The disaster made the Irish coast a place of international consequence: rescue work, the recovery of bodies and hurried burials centred on Queenstown, now Cobh. Local people encountered the human wreckage of a global naval war directly, rather than merely reading battlefield reports in newspapers.
On 1 January 1864, full civil registration of births, deaths and marriages commenced in Ireland. Registration of non-Catholic marriages had existed since 1845, but the new arrangement extended a legal duty to record births and deaths, as well as Roman Catholic marriages. It did not displace parish registers: Catholic clergy continued to create sacramental records of baptism and marriage, while the state compiled its own civil evidence. Nevertheless, the change was important. For families, it meant that birth, death and marriage increasingly became matters documented in standard forms, through local registrars and superintendent registrars, rather than events known chiefly through household, parish and community memory.
