By Francisco "A.J." Camacho
The Tennessean
February 21st, 2022
Nashville has a sister city, and it has been called “the European capital of terrorism.”
Belfast, Northern Ireland is probably most well known as the center of “The Troubles,” an irregular conflict that spanned thirty years from the 1960s through the 1990s in which 3,500 people lost their lives.
But despite this dark past, modern Belfast is in many respects a model city. I sat down with the Right Honourable, the Lord Mayor of Belfast Councillor Kate Nicholl to discuss the relationship between Nashville and Belfast.
The Nashville-Belfast sister city relationship
Lord Mayor Nicholl considers the relationship between Nashville and Belfast to be the natural consequence of “a number of similarities.”
For one, around 10% of Nashville residents have Irish ancestry, among the highest in the United States.
Moreover, they are hubs of music and songwriting that love the country genre. Visiting dozens of pubs in Belfast, I found the favorite songs for live musicians were originals of Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash, and Chris Stapleton.
Besides these similarities and an annual festival of Nashville culture in Belfast, Nicholl emphasized that the relationship manifests in academic cooperation too.
She described meeting with Belmont University students and faculty as part of a conference in 2021. Someone with the university told Nicholl about Nashville-based Thistle Farms, a nonprofit offering housing, employment, and support networks to women who suffered from prostitution, trafficking, and addiction.
The Lord Mayor said she was inspired to pursue a similar project for ex-prisoners in Northern Ireland, though the project has yet to manifest.
Progress in Belfast
Across the late 20th Century, Belfast was the epicenter of The Troubles, a conflict between predominantly-Catholic nationalists who seek a united Ireland, mostly-Protestant unionists who want to remain in the U.K., and the British state.
“You couldn't come into the city center back then without being searched,” Nicholl noted, “You became accustomed to the sound of bombs and just a very different world.”
Today, Northern Ireland's capital is much improved. “People are able to live and work together. There's an increase in integrated education. We have a fragile but existing peace process,” Nicholl proudly said.
This progress extends to ethnic diversity, too. In the 1960s, there was an idea that racism didn’t exist in Northern Ireland. To the extent that was true, it was only because virtually everyone white.
Nicholl remembers her time working for Anna Lo, the only non-white member in the Northern Ireland Assembly’s history: “When she first arrived in the seventies, people would stop and stare at her because she was ethnically different. That doesn't happen anymore: we're a far more diverse society.”
Lessons across the Atlantic
Obviously, the general problem facing the city is not unique. “This is universal,” Nicholl told me, “In America, you have serious issues at the moment in terms of political ideology, and that can divide families.”
In this respect, Lord Mayor Nicholl is in an interesting position. She is a member of the Alliance party which, while technically unionist, is a cross-community and moderate party.
I asked Nicholl what she recommends for healing these kinds of divisions. Her suggestion: meet with people face-to-face and talk. Nicholl has found that it’s easy to misplace anger from behind a computer screen, but “when you’re in a room with another human being and you’re looking into their eyes and you can see that they’re actually just the same, it’s harder to have that level of hate.
To the Lord Mayor, there is a fundamental human desire to feel valued, and “often, the most extreme views are just a way of having that acknowledged.”
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