Updated guide at: NorthernIrelandThemes.com
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A short-ish course in Northern Ireland life and culture
The UK is a strange kind of place to live in: it's made up of four kingdoms which were originally populated by four distinct groups of people. Even that isn't the whole story as England was settled by a number of different groups so that the dialect spoken in different areas can be quite distinct: perhaps you already know that Yorkshire people speak funny, well so do the Geordies a little further north, the Cornish in the south-west, the Cockneys in parts of London, etc. What I'm saying is that there are very striking regional differences in the local culture.
For instance in London you get a 'party culture'. Also, because of the Tube (the underground railway system there) it's much more common for people to rely on public transport to get around which essentially confines them to the city with consequent knock-on effects on aspects of the local culture. The pay is a good deal higher there too than elsewhere in the country which obviously affects things, sometimes in rather peculiar ways. Because of the much higher cost of housing you get the situation where streets of terrace housing are populated by people driving BMW's and Mercedes which is something that would never happen in Northern Ireland: if you can afford a BMW here you just don't live in a terrace house! Generally speaking pubs (bars, it's short for 'public house') are mostly filled by I suppose what we'd call the 'working class' drinking beer and the like (I don't go to pubs so don't rely entirely on this!) as opposed to the 'wine bars' which is where you'd find the 'middle class' drinking, yes, wine (and fancy drinks too). Probably because it's a big city, people aren't as friendly on the street as they are in less populated areas although they generally aren't as rude as in places like New York. They're OK when you get to know them (remember I work quite closely with our London office and have several relations living there) but they tend to 'keep to themselves'. For instance, when we went to Newbury (outside London) one time to look up a relation the people living next door to him didn't even know his name. As it's something of an international city too you get people either from, or descended from, just about every nationality you could imagine and that affects the culture a good deal too. If you check your map you'll see that it's towards the south of England which affects the climate a whole lot more than I would have thought myself so that the summers are much warmer. Warm enough to allow the cafes and bars to have tables out on the street. It's also quite close to France and, in general, it has a more continental feel to it than cities elsewhere in the country. Oh, and because it takes so long for people to travel to and from work they tend to do some work along the way (so there are lots of mobile phones around) and eat their evening meal much later (anything from 7pm).
So why did I say so much about the culture in London? Well, it's the UK capital and that combined with the large proportion of the total population living there (about 20%) mean that it has a significant influence on culture in the rest of the country. So, almost all examples of a British accent you (and we) hear are actually London accents. If something happens in London it appears on the news everywhere else in the country but if the same thing had happened in, say, Edinburgh you might never hear about it. As an example of this, a whale was stranded in the Thames River in London and was headline news throughout the day yet this is a relatively common thing in Scottish cities and is never on the news at all.
So what's it like here? Northern Ireland is largely agricultural with just two big cities and they're not that large either. There's Belfast with about 500,000 people in it and Londonderry (or Derry) with less. Belfast is pretty compact and, if you miss the rush hours, it would take less than 30 minutes to get into the country from anywhere in it. We can get to our house in the country in 20 minutes if there aren't any traffic jams. We don't have an underground system or trolley buses or anything like that so public transport basically means the bus (or train, but not within the city). In practice though I think most people get around by car: certainly almost everyone seems to have a car these days. For some reason, that I can't understand, when married people go out in the car it is ALWAYS the husband who does the driving but. It gets really silly at times like when the wife keeps the car during the day and drops her husband off to work first... the husband drives to work with the wife then they both get out so she can drive off which is a really stupid thing to do in rush hour traffic, but it's always what happens!
Geography... Northern Ireland is really tiny: from Belfast you can only drive about 60 miles north or south, about 150 miles to the west and maybe 30 to the east before you are either out of the country or into the sea. Because the distances are so short people would normally go out for a 'run' at the weekend, if only to do the shopping in one of the out of town shopping centres. Believe me you do NOT want to try shopping in the shopping centres in town on a Saturday as you can barely move due to the sheer number of people and parking the car is a nightmare. Since most folk are driving not that many of them work on the way to/from work (this number is NOT zero as you might have expected!) and consequently there aren't that many mobile phones around as compared to places with larger cities. Actually I'm not over the moon with a mobile myself as I don't fancy the idea of holding a miniature microwave transmitter to my head given that it only take a few seconds in a microwave oven to do serious damage to food (ie cook it).
Economy... Well we're part of the UK so everything is dictated by UK laws in terms of tax, interest rates, currency, etc. However, the Northern Ireland economy is dominated by the public sector so even when there is a recession in the UK as a whole we wouldn't notice that much if it weren't on the news. We've a Value Added Tax which goes on just about everything but it's included in the price so you don't need a calculator to work out what you've to pay in the shops (well I would if I ever looked at the prices as I'm just dreadful at counting!). Income tax starts at 20% but it's mainly 23% up to about £30,000 ($45,000) annual salary and 40% on everything above that. As well as that there's National Insurance which is another income tax in all but name and is about 7%. The currency is Sterling but you probably gathered that. We've two universities which is a lot considering that the entire population is only about 1.5 million but quite a lot of students come up from the Republic as they get free education here whereas they'd have to pay for it there (there's about 3 million people living down there I think).
Language... don't you think I speak great English as it's my second language? Just kidding, but when I was a little kid we only had holidays locally and I always assumed that I'd been speaking Irish! Actually we get the odd Irish language programme on TV now and there's a whole channel devoted to broadcasting in it in the Republic. Since Northern Ireland is so small that it's possible to pick up their TV stations too if your aerial is pointed in the right direction so you can get their three channels (one being in Irish is totally useless to me) and our two BBC channels and the three commercial ones. We've cable in Belfast and there's the satellite so you can get another 100 or so if you really want them.
Climate... As I said Belfast is small and it's also a good deal further north than London. I don't know if you'd know about oceanic and continental climates but Belfast has an oceanic one while London is partly continental. Basically if you've an oceanic climate you don't get very cold winters or very warm summers because the ocean beside you takes ages to heat up and cool down. Since land heats up and cools down pretty fast you get very hot summers and much colder winters (depending on latitude obviously). So when I'm going to London in the summer it's always a few degrees warmer and I leave the coat at home whereas in the winter I need to take a big coat. So what other differences do the size and climate make? Well, we just don't have the population to support a 'party culture' and the cafes and bars rarely have the tables out on the street.
Housing... Houses are pretty affordable here so generally speaking it is only the 'working class' (for want of a better word) who live in the terrace houses or flats (apartment blocks). Everyone else lives in semi-detached (duplex) or detached houses or bungalows. Something like 60% of people own their houses, though they're generally paying a mortgage (which usually runs for 25 years). Due to the tax system here it's cheaper to buy a house by borrowing money than it would be using cash which is pretty fortunate as most people wouldn't be able to fork out the full amount in cash anyway.
Bars and pubs... As in London the folk in the pubs are usually 'working class'. Thus far we have relatively few wine bars.
Partly because it's a small city the people are quite friendly and people would normally know their neighbours. I don't know if it's like that in the countryside in every country but here at least any news spreads like wildfire, even more so if it's actually factual news. You might also notice that people here can be quite nosey, particularly in the country.
Multiculturalism... Belfast is very much a provincial city for all sorts of reasons. Obviously the 'troubles' put people off coming here unless they had to but even aside from that to get to the mainland you have to get on a ferry or plane and that usually works as a pretty good barrier to emigration too. Anyway the upshot of this is that 99% of the people here are Irish or Scottish or at least 'white'. We only really started getting Chinese restaurants in the last couple of decades and other than for them we've very few ethnic groups at the moment although that is changing and is one of the few very noticeable effects of us being, more or less, at peace.
Meals... Well nobody has that far to go so the evening meal is generally taken somewhere between 5 and 7pm. What do we eat? Well the European influence has really messed us up and, going by the shelves in the supermarkets, most people seem to have drifted into Italian food (pastas and pizzas generally). You've maybe heard of the potato famine we had in the last century... well we still make our way through a LOT of potatoes in the form of chips (French fries; we call potato chips 'crisps'), or boiled (or roast at Christmas). Our sort-of traditional dish used to be stew but it seems to have been passed over which is just as well as nobody really liked it anyway! From the mainland influence in the past we would have always have had 'meat and two veg' but the BSE (mad cow) thing has knocked out the meat part of that (meat always meant beef). In theory, because we're Scottish descent, I suppose we should be eating haggis but our ancestors had enough sense to forget about that as it's absolutely revolting (we dropped the porridge too for the same reason!). People who work usually would have the main meal at night with something light for lunch (usually sandwiches or yoghurt). Again the Europeans have messed up our breakfast... in times gone by it was toast, tea/coffee and a choice of cornflakes or... cornflakes! Nowadays most people take some sort of muesli instead of the cornflakes and some sort of fruit juice instead of the tea/coffee. Oh yes, before we go to bed we'd have supper which would generally be toast with tea/coffee. I generally take fruit juice instead of the tea/coffee whenever possible. Other stuff that we eat... a fair bit of tofu (made from soya beans) since the demise of beef, chicken, turkey (formerly just at Christmas but throughout the year these days), venison (which is a bit expensive and hard to get), rabbit, all sorts of vegetables (generally peas, carrots and corn but also things like cauliflower and Brussels sprouts [both of which I don't take as I hate them]). We've a couple of unusual types of bread here which you'll likely not have seen before: potato bread (which comes in little squares) and soda bread (which comes in rough triangles about a centimetre thick).
Festivals and stuff... From about April through to September it's the 'marching season' here. The Orange and Black lodges have marches (practice ones earlier in the year) to commemorate various past victories over the ancestors of what are now the Nationalist section of the population (politics and religion being rather unfortunately aligned here that means protestant victories over the Catholics). Well, in theory they're for that and some in the nationalist population choose to consider that as still being the case but in reality it's our local carnival. If you've ever had the chance to see the carnival in Brazil on TV it's very much the same here (but rather more subdued and without the topless dancers). What they do is congregate at some point (it changes each year) then march to a field (which also changes each year) with the various lodges marching behind bands and with banners and all that. When they get to the field they're all knackered after having walked for miles to get there so everyone has a rest while some folk make speeches praising this and denouncing that. When they're all rested they march back again and are consequently totally knackered that night. You'll have to see it sometime. The nationalists get up to similar things, commemorating different events naturally but I've never been to theirs. They have a very nice carnival in, I think, August which runs for a couple of days which I'd like to get to someday and I figure that our lot will feel safe enough to go to it given another year or two of peace. Actually in days gone by everyone went to the Orange marches just for the carnival atmosphere but that stopped with the start of the troubles as people just didn't feel safe being surrounded by 'the enemy' which is sad. We have quite a number of non-tribal festivals too with lots of villages hosting 'fairs' throughout the summer with a big one at Ballycastle over three days in August and then there's the Lord Mayor's show in Belfast which is like a subdued version of the Rio carnival.
Banking... We've really only the four proper banks in Northern Ireland (you don't get the local banks like you do in the US anywhere in the UK) along with maybe a dozen building societies (similar to the savings and loans in the US). It is unbelievably difficult to open a new bank account these days thanks to anti-money laundering legislation brought in several years ago. Once you've passed that hurdle you can have cheque books, savings accounts, credit cards, cash cards, etc. Shops that accept credit cards accept both Visa and Mastercard so either one does when you're here (that's not the case in the rest of Europe though). Similarly most of the cash machines will accept most of the cash cards. Courtesy of the American influence (well, more likely the Anglo-Saxon influence) you generally only get instructions in English although foreign cards are sometimes offered a choice of English, French, Spanish and German. All the shops accept cheques as long as you have a 'cheque card' as these actually guarantee your cheques up to the limit on the card (usually £100). You can usually (always?) use your cheque card to get cash in the machines. Exchange controls... we don't have any, so if anybody is inclined to carry out a suitcase stuffed with cash (or bring one in) then they can. We've a limit like the $10,000 one in the US where the banks have to report deposits to somebody but I don't know what it is
Shopping... The 'corner shop' has basically bitten the dust and apart from the city centres people mainly shop in shopping centres (malls). Generally people would just shop once a week but my Mum likes going to the shops so she's in them a lot more often than that, even more so since Dad retired. We don't get the same chains here as you'll have seen in the US though we do have rough equivalents for most of them. We've food shops (like Tesco, Sainsbury, etc.) and all sorts of clothes shops as well as department stores. I think the only one that you may have seen is Brookes Brothers (which is actually a British shop!). We don't have the likes of Harrods and Tiffany in Northern Ireland but London is full of shops like that. I guess we get at least some of the designer labels here but I've never been looking out for them
Cultural things... We've cinemas, an opera house, and various places for shows. They just finished building the Waterfront Hall in 1997 and it's used for various shows and events throughout the year. There's a Belfast Festival each year which attracts acts from all over the place and Queens University hosts various things like the Film Festival. Not here but easy enough to get to is the Edinburgh Festival over in Scotland which is similar to our own but on a grander scale. London is just full of theatres and sometime I must go to some of them! Apparently Belfast is just full of art galleries but that's another one of the things that I need the days and weeks extended for. Both of the Universities host various events during the year for their students eg fashion shows.
Social Security stuff
As from 1947 we have had a Welfare State..
Education is free from primary school right through to university with school being compulsory up to age 16. At age 11 you can currently go into either a Grammar school, if you pass the '11 plus' test, or a Secondary school if you don't. Most people consider the Grammar school to be a preparation for university. Depending on the parents income students will get a grant towards their expenses at university though they can also apply for a subsidised student loan too. Local schools come in four varieties... state schools which are mainly attended by non-Catholics (actually mainly protestants but other ethnic groups would go to these too), catholic schools which are mainly Catholics, integrated schools which are a mixture and public schools (these are actually private schools ie the parents pay fees and, no, I don't know why we call them public). The public schools are effectively private sector versions of integrated schools: they don't care what race/colour/religion you are so long as your credit rating is good! We also have single-sex and mixed (co-educational) versions of most of these types though by and large the schools are mixed these days: the boys only public schools seem to have specialised in producing gay men which has put people off them a little! I just went to a mixed Grammar school so I hope I'm safe enough that way!!
Health care is free for us in all respects except for prescription medication which we've to make a contribution towards. Naturally there's also private health care but it's really only for routine operations and is on nothing like the scale in the US. If you're unemployed you get paid something (about £50) per week for the first six months but as I've not been unemployed since just after I left university I'm kind of hazy on this.
When you hit 65 you get the state pension which is based on your National Insurance contributions and is currently about £70 per week but it's gradually being phased out and by the time I reach 65 I'll probably only be able to buy myself a packet of crisps with it! Actually it's currently age 60 for women but it's being increased to 65 over the next lot of years.
Employment... For all but the very smallest companies it is obligatory to advertise vacancies as a result of several lots of anti-discrimination legislation (banning discrimination on the grounds on religion and sex/marital status and soon for race too). As far as I know everybody gets at least four weeks holidays but it's usually five. If you're working and get pregnant then you get three months off per pregnancy at full pay, not counting any time you might be off sick prior to the birth. You usually work about 40 hours each week for a full-time job or up to 20 for part-time (different legislation applies to part-timers). All of the larger companies have a company sponsored pension scheme but you usually need to pay 5% towards this. Lastly, the important bit... yes, salary! Just considering full-time jobs gross (pre-tax) salaries range from about £8,000 ($12,000) to around £30,000 ($45,000) for the bulk of people and you end up with about 2/3rds of that 'in your hand'.
Sundays... Northern Ireland is the most religious part of the UK with more people going regularly to church/chapel each Sunday than anywhere else. As a result of that we're only now starting to permit shops to open on Sundays and only for part of the day even then.
American influences... Well everybody uses credit/debit cards these days: even my Mum! The TV is full of American programmes, even more so for the satellite channels though there are also foreign language channels from Europe on the satellite but then nobody watches them (well except for the x-rated ones from Scandinavia and the nude chat shows from Italy). Surprisingly perhaps we only got our first McDonalds a couple of years ago but the TV dinner has been well entrenched for years. We drive on the left but I figure that sooner or later Europe will enforce a switch which should be VERY interesting (they did it in Sweden about 20 or 30 years ago). Both our electricity (220V) and TV standard (PAL) are different so the Canadian across the road has a garage full of useless electrical stuff which she probably paid a fortune to transport here.
European influences... Mostly this relates to stuff that doesn't affect peoples' lives directly as it's at such a high level eg there's a lot of legislation relating to takeovers of European companies at the European level. We've not adopted the 'social chapter' yet but some bits of that creep in sometimes so that there's a maximum length of the working week now of 48 hours. There's also bits and pieces relating to human rights but really that doesn't affect normal people. Once you're in mainland Europe you don't need a passport to cross most of the borders but then the immigration people never really bothered much about passports anyway. You don't need to go through customs anymore when you're travelling between European countries which is quite handy. The French keep trying to impose maximum quotas on the American TV programmes but the UK is ignoring that as we'd rather have the American programmes because they're much better than the European (ie non-UK) ones and they do have the distinct advantage of being in the right language for us too. Consumer products tend to be produced on a European-wide basis these days but it's really only noticeable on the multi-lingual packaging and, of course, in the wider variety of food we've started to get lately.
General stuff
I'm not sure which of the following might be obvious and which wouldn't so I'll just put it all down
Everyone here takes a holiday every year. People with children would mostly take it in the summer when the kids are out of school (our school year runs from September to June) when, of course, the prices go up so that's why I generally head off at other times. Most people just go for the two weeks and in Northern Ireland that usually means the 'twelfth fortnight' which is the fortnight containing the July 12th holiday when factories usually close down. Usually people head off somewhere warm and sunny which in most cases means Spain or the Greek islands though a lot of people have started going to France (usually taking their own car on the ferry).
Literacy runs to getting on for 100% although you do hear of people managing to get right to age 16 and not being able to read.
Everyone has electric in their houses. Except for us! Well, in our country cottage anyway. Likewise for mains water and flush toilets. (we've to go across the road for these in the country!) We used to have gas (propane) too but that was stopped quite a while ago although they're currently in the process of putting it back in again. It seems like everyone has a phone too but it's actually 'only' about 90% of people. You can call anywhere in the world from any phone (private or payphone). We've phone cards as well as coins but I'm never really using payphones that much and I just use my phone chargecard when I am.
You've a tax return to do each year on the self-assessment basis (ie something like in the US) which covers the year from April to March. We're taxed independently so that each person gets one of these. In practice, unless you're getting income apart from your salary, you don't get a return to complete as it's all worked out automatically in the simple cases (ie for most people).
We don't have rabies (yet) so there are strict quarantine controls at the borders of the British Isles (you can take pets back and forth to the Republic). We've agriculture inspectors at the entrances to Northern Ireland too in the same way as you get at the California/Arizona border.
The island of Ireland doesn't have any snakes at all. Supposedly because St Patrick banished them but more likely because they all got wiped out in the last ice age and nobody was daft enough to bring more in.
We don't have any poisonous insects. We do have bees and wasps that sting but they're not deadly (unless you're allergic to the venom). We've also got little biting midges but you usually wouldn't run across them and they're not poisonous anyway: just annoying.
We don't get things like termites and the like as it's too cold for them.
We don't get things like typhoid or malaria or any of the tropical diseases. Mostly it's the flu that floors everyone! Kids get stuff like mumps, measles and all the other kiddie diseases.
All the water is drinkable. Point to note: we're very careful when abroad to operate on the basis of 'no uncooked food and no ice in the drinks' and, thus far, we have never been sick on holiday from eating the food (even in India when I was expecting it).
It's safe to walk out during the day and at night though naturally there are areas in the city where it would be more sensible not to. Well I feel safe walking out at night, a girl on her own mightn't I suppose.
Children would generally walk to school if they're close enough but you really notice the extra traffic caused by the school runs when classes start after the summer
Famous residents... Quite a surprising number for such a small place, here's a brief selection:
C S Lewis, the author of the Chronicles of Narnia, whose life was depicted in Shadowlands
George Best, the footballer who died recently
James Galway, classic flautist
Kenneth Branagh, the actor/director
Liam Neeson, star of Michael Collins (based in Ireland) and Schindler's List
Van Morrison, the singer/songwriter
and, of course, the Titanic, star of many films such as Titanic, Raise the Titanic and Titanic - The Story, to name but a few, not to mention the designer, Thomas Andrews, whose house is still standing as indeed is, I think, his boat house at Whiterock.
Guidebooks... There aren't a whole lot of guidebooks on Northern Ireland. In fact there is only the Visitors Guide to Northern Ireland that covers the province specifically. All the others cover the whole of the island of Ireland and generally skimp on their coverage of NI (which makes for a confusing read sometimes)..
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