Dublin and Belfast: Two Cities, Two Irelands

Céad Míle Fáilte, and welcome to your Letter from Ireland for this week. It’s a bright, pleasant day here in County Cork, with the light arriving a little earlier each morning. How are things in your part of the world today?

Last week, Carina and I took a trip northwards, and found ourselves with the chance to spend time in both Dublin and Belfast where we met up with our Green Room genealogist, Jayne McGarvey. It’s not often we make it up to the northern part of the island, and the journey reminded me just how much these two cities, separated by barely a hundred miles, tell a very different story about Ireland’s past.

I’m sipping on a cup of Barry’s tea as I write, and I hope you’ll join me with whatever you fancy as we explore these two fascinating cities together.

Two Irish Cities, One Island

Standing on O’Connell Street in Dublin, and then just days later walking through the streets around Belfast City Hall, I was struck by how clearly architecture can reflect a nation’s fortunes, both rising and falling, shifting and reshaping itself with the tides of history.

Dublin’s great flowering came in the 1700s, known as the Georgian period, when Ireland still had its own parliament and the Anglo-Irish aristocracy invested heavily in creating one of Europe’s most elegant cities. Today if you walk through Merrion or Fitzwilliam Squares you’ll see what I mean: perfectly proportioned townhouses with glass fanlights above imposing coloured doorways, wide streets, and sweeping squares with private gardens. This was a city built to impress!

The Wide Streets Commission, established in 1757, played the main role in reshaping Dublin into city of order and symmetry. Architects such as James Gandon gave us buildings like the Custom House and the Four Courts, classical facades that reflected Dublin’s ambitions as the second city of the British Empire.

Then along came 1801 and the Act of Union (which created the United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland). Ireland’s parliament was dissolved and political power moved to Westminster. Dublin lost its central governing role almost overnight. The Anglo-Irish families who had built those magnificent townhouses increasingly spent their time in London. Over the following decades, the city that had been a confident capital became something quieter. It was still important, still beautiful, but diminished by the year.

Belfast: A Victorian Powerhouse

However, while Dublin was losing political importance, Belfast was only beginning its rise. Around 1800, Belfast was still a modest town of about 20,000 people. By 1900, it had grown into a booming industrial city of roughly 350,000 – becoming the linen capital of the world, a major shipbuilding centre (yes, the Titanic and so many other ships were built there), and a hub of rope-making and heavy engineering.

The Victorians and later Edwardians built Belfast in their own image: solid, industrious, commercial, and confident. Even today, its architecture tells the story. If you look at Belfast City Hall, completed in 1906, you will see a building of pure Edwardian self-assurance – with Portland stone, a copper dome, and a scale that announces arrival. The banks and commercial buildings around Donegal Square project a sense of trade and money rather than aristocratic leisure.

Even the grand terraces of houses surrounding the core have a different feel from Dublin’s Georgian squares. They are larger, more ornate, and were built by newly wealthy industrialists rather than old landed families.

The Great Migration

Both cities absorbed huge numbers of people from the countryside in the decades following the Great Famine of the 1840s.

Dublin received waves of desperate refugees from the rural south and west. Many ended up in overcrowded tenements carved out of those once-grand Georgian houses. A single room in a Henrietta Street mansion – the whole house once home to an aristocratic family – might now shelter an entire family, or even two. These became the tenements of Dublin that were occupied in this manner all the way to the early 1970s.

Belfast’s migration followed a different pattern. Its expanding industries needed labour, and people came, first from Counties Antrim and Down, and then further afield. The linen mills and shipyards offered wages that struggling tenant farmers could scarcely imagine. The city expanded rapidly outwards, in contrast to Dublin, whose older core was left to rot from the inside.

Divided Histories, Shared Island

Moving between these two cities in the space of a few days reminds me of an important truth: there isn’t just one Irish story.

Dublin carries the weight of ancient capital status, with layers of history stretching back to the Vikings and beyond. It is a city that has seen sovereignty come and go –  one that became the capital of an independent nation in 1922, after more than a century of political and economic decline.

Belfast is younger, industrial in its foundations, and shaped by Victorian enterprise and commerce. Partition in 1921 made it the capital of Northern Ireland, giving it a political importance it had not previously held. Its twentieth-century history was deeply troubled, but walk its streets today and you’ll find a city full of friendly and welcoming people and steadily reinventing itself once again.

Did Your Ancestors Know These Great Cities?

All of this brings me to a question for you.

Many of our ancestors passed through Dublin. It was a major port of departure for those leaving Ireland, particularly in the nineteenth century, and thousands said goodbye to home from its quays. Records connected with shipping, migration, and administration are still associated with the Custom House and its surroundings.

Belfast, too, sent many people across to Britain and across the Atlantic, especially from Ulster and the surrounding counties. And both cities drew people from across Ireland who came seeking work, opportunity, or simply escape from rural poverty.

Did any of your ancestors live in Dublin or Belfast? Perhaps they worked in Belfast’s linen mills or shipyards? Or passed through Dublin on their way to a new life overseas?

I’d love to hear your family’s connection to these two great Irish cities. Do leave a comment below and share your story.

That’s it for this week.

Slán for now,

Mike