Visiting Belfast, Northern Ireland

 

The last stop on the International Downtown Association World Towns Summit was in Belfast, Northern Ireland, a place I have been eager to visit. Belfast is a city in transition. The Good Friday Peace Accords were signed in 1998, but there is still a visible simmering tension between the Loyalists (Protestants loyal to the United Kingdom) and the Republicans (Catholics yearning to break away from the UK.) Another post will follow about that, but this one will focus more on other elements of Belfast as it recovers from years of financial decline and conflict and begins to grow.

Once an economic powerhouse where the British Empire manufactured textiles and built ships, Belfast has nice architectural bones with lots of red brick factories and row houses, sprinkled with some new glass towers rising above. Belfast celebrates that they built the Titanic and says with a laugh that the ship was just fine when it left their docks. They tell stories of milling lots of linen in their glory days. I kept imagining ships full of Indian cotton arriving on their shores.

As part of the Summit, we got to meet the Nightlife Czar and Willy Jack, the Whiskey Guy, who owns a couple pubs and a whiskey museum and is dedicated to building tourism in Belfast. These guys have helped add lots of murals and art all over the city transforming the imagery beyond martyr murals memorializing past conflict.

The Summit also had us speak to other leaders like a policeman who talked about the challenges to rethinking policing - saying that instead of being a “police force” they are a “police service” trying to show they are there to serve all the community instead of forcing them to behave a certain way; a professor dedicated to studying “The Troubles” to learn how to move past it and the director of the Belfast Stories Center, a new museum that will try to capture the wide variety of stories from that time and create a space for cultural regeneration. It was clear that Belfast believes telling its stories from the past and including as many voices as possible is key to a peaceful prosperous future.

One of the issues dampening the idea of Irish unification is the economic lagging of Northern Ireland, but what I saw were signs of progress like a new rail station and news that they were replacing their old fleet of trains with new ones next year that will trim the time it takes to get between Dublin and Belfast to 90 minutes, making economic connections between the cities much more feasible. I also saw plenty of life on the streets and full fancy restaurants and some new commercial towers.