Bars are full, restaurants are turning away customers who don’t have reservations and, judging by the people laden with bags, the Christmas shopping season is already under way. Belfast has known plenty of crises down the decades but this doesn’t feel like one of them.
Instead, on a Thursday evening in November, Northern Ireland’s capital has the air of any other big provincial UK city, with a thriving hospitality sector and plenty of money changing hands. Were it not for the accents, it could be Leeds or Manchester.
But as with Leeds and Manchester, scars are visible just a short walk from the city centre, and in Belfast these result not just from the impact of industrial decline but from the Troubles, too. The Berlin Wall may have come down; the “peace wall” separating the Falls and Shankill roads has not.
Brexit has added a new level of complexity to the highly charged politics of Northern Ireland. The protocol agreed by London and Brussels prevented a hard border being created between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland by putting a barrier between Northern…
