The devastating Titan incident captured the world’s interest in a way that the sinking of a refugee boat can never do

The fate of the Titan is a tragic loss

It is difficult to think about much else at the moment but the fate of the Titan submersible which went missing on a dive to view the wreck of the Titanic.

As I write, the world is still reeling from the tragic news that had become sadly inevitable as the search went on: that all five died due to a “catastrophic implosion” of the vessel.

The lives of these men – who are sons, fathers, partners like everyone else – are a huge loss. However, I’m finding it hard not to contrast the attempted rescue with that of another vessel: the fishing boat which capsized off the coast of Greece just a week earlier.

A member of the Coastguard overlooks survivors as they rest in a warehouse used as a temporary shelter, after a boat carrying dozens of migrants sank in the Ionian Sea, in Kalamata town, Greece, last week.

Hundreds of people died or are still missing in this disaster – the worst of its kind in recent years - including up to 100 children. Like adventurer Hamish Harding, businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Sulaiman Dawood, OceanGate chief executive Stockton Rush and Titanic expert and explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet, many of the women and children on board, who were believed to be locked in the hold, were trapped in a confined space, unable to escape while the water built up around them – in a terrifying wait for death.

The devastating Titan incident captured the world’s interest in a way that the sinking of a refugee boat can never do. Indeed, there is little doubt that the tale of these men and the loss of their vessel, like the sinking of the Titanic before it, will go down in history.

The stories of the thousands of refugees who have been lost in European seas in the past decade will not.

It is a difficult reality to face that a multi-million dollar rescue, pulling together military and civilian resources and expertise from across the globe, can be activated in the blink of an eye for a five-strong group of billionaires, while it took over 24 hours for one coastguard rescue boat to make a half-hearted attempt to save hundreds of asylum seekers.

Following last week’s tragedy, humanitarian organisations, including the United Nations refugee arm, UNHCR, issued a warning to European nations that they have a responsibility to rescue anyone in trouble at sea, “regardless of their nationality, status or the circumstances in which they are found”.

The argument often used against pouring resources into rescuing asylum boats is that those travelling in small boats across the Mediterranean, or via the Atlantic route, did not “need” to make the journey: they could have stayed in a safer country than their own closer to home, rather than take the risk to travel to Europe. I won’t attempt to counter this now: I have written ad nausem in the past about why this is not as simple as it sounds.

But what I will point out is this: the Titan passengers also did not “need” to make the journey. They had far less “need” than those fleeing persecution, war and extreme hardship at home. They chose to go – and paid $250,000 for the privilege. Yet no-one has (and rightly so) suggested that every possible resource should not have been put into their rescue.

To paraphrase George Orwell: “All humans are equal, but some humans are more equal than others.”