Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Northern Ireland’ Category

Planning for Belfast’s City Hall began, naturally enough, in 1888 when it was awarded the status of city by Queen Victoria (hence the relatively large number of things in the city named after her, of course) with building competed in 1906.

The city centre location makes the grounds a very popular area for lunch in the Summer months and they’re used as the venue for the Christmas markets and various concerts.

Although there are regular free tours of the building during the week, these aren’t terribly well promoted at the moment so many people miss the impressive Victorian architecture, stained glass windows and paintings which are certainly worth the 40 minutes or so that they take.

 The Albert Clock is one of many Belfast monuments that were named after aspects of Queen Victoria’s reign, in this case after her late consort, Prince Albert. As you can see there’s a life-size statue of him right there on the west face of the monument which was completed in 1853.

Whilst many would blame the lean of the tower (which is quite noticeable) on too many bomb explosions around it, in fact it’s actually due to it being built on soft marshy land and the passing traffic over the years.

Although presently a little away from the centre of the city, the enormous number of developments currently taking place nearby seem likely to make this a much more central monument in a few years by which time the current regeneration of the centre and the docks area will have been largely completed.

Sainsbury likes to portray itself as a customer oriented family-friendly store but one policy that they’ve recently introduced in the Forestside store in Belfast is distinctly anti-family and the implementation of it is very anti-customer.

As you’ll have noticed, I’ve posted next to nothing over the last month. A total of seven posts vs what would have been a more normal 30 in fact.

That’s because I’ve been over in Northern Ireland trying to sort out some administration since June 5th and only got back home on Friday evening.

Now, I wasn’t expecting there to be much change in the traffic on my websites but the blog is different. The most commonly held belief is that you need to post at least once a day to keep up the traffic. That seems reasonable: after all, blogs, for the most part, cover “current events” in some fashion so without the regular updates, the traffic on a blog is bound to drop off quite quickly, isn’t it?

Well, the funny thing is that the blog traffic didn’t drop at all by any meaningful amount. The number of hits showed very little change at all nor did the adsense income. The number of subscribers via Feedburner dropped about 10%. The number of incoming links as counted by Technorati went up.

So little was the change that it has me wondering if the best strategy would be to build up a blog over six months or so then start a new one.

Northern Ireland hasn’t been in the international news much lately but that’s not really an indication of peace as such, more an indication that violence isn’t happening which isn’t quite the same thing (welcome as non-violence always is, of course).

In fact the first indications of the arrival of peace was on its way started quite a number of years ago and, to my mind, was the arrival of the supermarket chain Tesco in 1997.  Prior to that the only UK supermarket chain operating in Northern Ireland was Marks & Spencer which had opened in 1967, 2 years prior to the start of the troubles, and hadn’t bothered expanding much since then. Nothing really says that peace is coming quite like big chunks of cash being invested.

However, the more certain arrival of peace (as opposed merely to reducing violence) was really only in the last few years and that has been marked in two very noticeable ways. Firstly the investments being made in the local economy are massive these days: you can’t drive more than a mile or two in Belfast without seeing building works of some kind. That’s also an aspect of the second point which is that there has been a large scale migration to Northern Ireland by everyone from the Poles to those that left because of the violence. Combine those two and the booming of the economy is very noticeable.

One very obvious side-effect of that mass immigration is that the house prices are going through the roof (hence the building work everywhere, of course) which is effectively a catching up on rises that didn’t happen in the last 30 years. The banks don’t seem to know what has hit them and mortgages are now available for up to 8 time salary (vs the maximum of 3 times just 3 or 4 years ago).

Anyway, at least Northern Ireland can now stand as an example of what it’s like when you do get to the end of the violence. Hopefully, it’ll provide an encouraging example to areas of the world that are still immersed in a culture of violence such as Colombia.