Foreign Perspectives

Belfast has always had a slightly rural feel about it. The countryside isn’t far from anywhere in the town and you can almost always see the green fields that surround the city. In other ways too it has never been terribly cosmopolitan with nightlife being relatively quiet for many years.

All that is changing though. For a number of years the nightlife has been getting considerably more lively and the city centre remains busy in the evenings these days with the increasing number of nightclubs and the like opening around the city not to mention the massive increase in city centre apartments that have been constructed over the last ten years or so.

A striking example that I found in my recent trip was the appearance of Anna Lo’s face on an election poster. You’d never have seen her before not because there was discrimination against non-whites here but rather because there weren’t any non-whites. Yet another welcome indication of the settling in of peace.