Moving to NI questions

[hedgehoggle]

This is something we've started mooting for various reasons such as housing, quality of life... but had a few practical questions. Hopefully someone will be able to help!

We're considering areas around Belfast and I wondered:

1. How difficult is it to find a primary place? DS would be 5/6 probably, we are Catholic if that makes a difference.
2. How difficult is it to find a nursery place? DD will be around 1/2
3. What's the NHS like? And maternity care? Although maternity care couldn't be much worse than some places by us!

Thanks so much for any answers

@Treesinmygarden - I hear you. Im surrounded by villages that are still very much still very inward thinking ( to be polite ) but again, its not a problem to us as a family. Both DH and myself are very much part of our community now so the raised eyebrows and pointed questions are no longer an issue.

Things really are different then 20 years ago, the changes Ive seen are really quite dramatic when you think it really is such a short time span.

@hedgehoggle jumping on this post as Irish husband and I have been having similar thoughts lately.
Interested to know if you have progressed much further with this.

I’m English and have lived in NI for the past decade. My late husband was originally from NI and I do think it eased my transition, but in general living here as an English person is totally fine. That said, I have always lived in heavily Protestant areas, so experiences may differ elsewhere but tbh I’d be surprised (other than in specifically hard-line areas but I wouldn’t want to live in those regardless of background!).

Personally I wouldn’t go for Carrick. It’s much nicer than it was but still not great. It depends where your husband ends up working as commuting here is a total pain. South Belfast (where Queen’s is) has some gorgeous areas. East Belfast is mixed (I lived there for a while) but Ballyhackamore is nice. We’re in Bangor and it’s great – we live in a village just east of the town and it’s like an ex-pat town, half of DD’s school friends have English parents and the other half parents from ROI! As a result it’s a very relaxed, inclusive environment (although, of course, heavily white).

Schools are fantastic. The NHS is on its knees and services aren’t anywhere near as well-provisioned as in England. I have private healthcare and I’m glad of it. That said, DD has always received great care. Maternity care was fine, if a little old-school.

After DH died I considered moving back to England but was pretty convinced that DD will have a better quality of life here. Now I’m so glad I didn’t move back. I love it here and wouldn’t live anywhere else (unless I was a millionaire and could move back to London!).

@peachgreen where in Bangor do you live if you don't mind me asking?
We are trying to narrow down places and this sounds very much like our sort of place. 😊

Is there a 4 year wait for cataract operations in NI @hedgehoggle ?

I know there are "cataract buses" bringing people from the Republic of Ireland to NI to get their cataracts done there as the wait is so long in RoI.
There's a political family in Kerry involved in the organisation of the buses afaik.

I'm also in Bangor @dipO86 , happy to answer questions (any specifics just drop me a PM). I'm from Dublin originally and love it here.

I'll PM you as it would be very outing – it's not a big place!

There are long waiting lists for everything including cataracts. Those buses are bringing people to the - increasingly popular- private hospitals here.

My advice is don't do it, and especially don't do it to your kids, and especially not the Triangle area as people have suggested.
I was dragged to live there as a child, we're from another country.
I was excited about the move initially but ended up being bullied relentlessly by the local kids, even after many years of living there and adopting the local accent I was still seen as an outsider.
If you don't have any local links you might struggle to make proper friends, people are friendly on the surface but it's a highly cliquey and tribal place, if your face doesn't fit for some arbitrary reason or if you unwittingly do something to annoy the locals they'll turn half the town against you (everyone is someone's brother/sister/cousin/friend from school/friend of a friend etc)
Many people are openly racist and homophobic, religion is rammed down your throat at every turn and the whole society is generally parochial and insular.
There are hardly any arts or cultural events, only a handful of very mediocre restaurants, bars and cafes, outside of the summer tourist reason the towns are dead and it's cold, wet, dark and depressing for much of the year.
Yes, the area has nice nature and beaches, but that's the only thing it has going for it.
Belfast has more going on but it has some scary sectarianism and a bit of an aggressive vibe. Lots of people walking about that you feel would start on you if they decide you've looked at them wrong. We had to go there one time just after the 12 July marches and there were burned out cars everywhere, this wasn't even that long ago.
Sorry to anyone from NI, I don't mean to offend anyone and I did meet some nice people, maybe if you're local it's a nice place to live but as an outsider I couldn't wait to leave as soon as I turned 18.

Well you have offended me for a start. You have got it completely wrong! The place isn't without its issues in some parts but no more than any other region of the UK!!!

You don't describe anywhere I recognise in 2025. NI is just not like that nowadays.

I'm guessing it's been a long time since you were 18 then??!

@Treesinmygarden Yes, it's been a long time but I go back regularly because my parents are still living there and I can't see that much has changed. Sorry if I've offended you but I'm just giving my opinion based on my own experiences, if you're Northern Irish you obviously won't have the same experience as an incomer does.
I'm sure plenty of people hate my country too though.

If you're RC be careful about east Belfast. Also Ballymena. Both could turn out to be challenging environments.

Try south Belfast.

If you're not familiar with Belfast at all, you need to do a lot of research

I was half joking about the being offended - but I think you have really misrepresented the place!

I moved away from NI and moved back, and I don't live anywhere near where I grew up. It really depends on where you are, but NI has changed, massively! You don't have to come from outside the place to see that.

Go into Cathedral Quarter on any night in Belfast now and the place is buzzing! So many visitors from all over the world and many different nationalities all living here now too which you wouldn't have seen at all years ago.

I mainly take issue with this, "Many people are openly racist and homophobic, religion is rammed down your throat at every turn and the whole society is generally parochial and insular" because that just isn't true for the majority of people!

East Belfast is more mixed now than it used to be. The nicer parts of Ballymena are fine. It's got good schools too.

South Belfast isn't all that in parts either - I wouldn't live in the Village area if you paid me!!

It's just like anywhere else - area matters, and where there are housing estates, and high concentrations of people living in social housing (and that is not a criticism!) and general deprivation, that's where you tend to find you wouldn't want to live.

@Treesinmygarden OK, so I must have imagined repeatedly being called a P**i (for being slightly olive skilled), being told to go back where I come from, my accent and name being mocked, being asked with a contemptuous tone where I'm from, being called a foreign freak etc. You might say that's just school kids being dicks but those things don't come from nowhere, they'll have picked up that language and attitudes from the adults around them.
Homophobia - I had a number of gay classmates and they all had a hard time, even later as adults, their own parents had a hard time accepting it as they were very religious.
Religion - had numerous people trying to convert us to their church, didn't know a single person who wasn't religious. Most events in town were run by churches. We had a chapel in our school, prayers in assembly and compulsory mass at Christmas and Easter.

I'm not saying there isn't anything good about NI and I'm sure there some areas in Belfast that are touristy and a bit more multi cultural and forward looking, but this doesn't mean that the locals will accept an incomer as one of them, and especially in more rural areas (I was talking about the North Coast area specifically).

East Belfast is rather fleggy - you'd need to know the area well to pick the right spot. A lot of Queens staff go for BT9 or Holywood, and Ormeau's quite popular these days. Hillsborough is nice but expensive, and rather a trek if working in Belfast. Bangor's not a bad option, either.

CollegeApplications' view doesn't chime at all with my own experiences as an incomer. Apart from the rain - there is quite a lot of that. It's not that cold though; summers are cooler than a lot of the UK, but winters tend to be milder.

Yeah there's parts of East Belfast that are tres posh now, I'm Catholic with an Irish (rather than NI) accent and a DC with an Irish name and I'd happily live in loads of areas. Ballyhack is very hipster!

The views above are outdated and not helpful to the OP or others in the same boat. I appreciate that there will be people who have had a negative experience but NI is a very different place to what it was twenty or more years ago. It also sounds like that poster when to a catholic school in a rural area; I don't think many gay youngsters in the past found the RC church/communities a particularly welcoming or accepting environment, whether that was in Portrush or Preston. Bit much to suggest homophobia or trying to dodge getting christened on the way to the Spar is a normal experience for NI residents.

10+ years ago when my mum worked in a large commercial solicitors firm she observed that a lot of the younger catholic fee earners were buying their first houses around the Creagh Road, Bloomfield, Orangefield, real East Belfast heartlands- obviously wanted Ballyhack but couldn't afford it and so spread the net wider. No one got burnt out or intimidated and these areas are still becoming more and more mixed.

DH is English; we live in Lisburn which has one of the army barracks and there's a lot of English accents knocking about. Most of the English people we know though aren't connected to the forces and so I don't think people make that automatic assumption as much. DH has never had a word said to him, nor has my Gaeilgeoir BIL from Dublin who lives in Hillsborough.

I'm old. Old enough to remember befriending the only black girl in the school, who got such a hard time that she left at the end of 1st year and went elsewhere. We met at a funeral over 40 years later and she remembered me being her friend. So I'm not stupid.

However it was 40 years ago. My children have gone to schools that were 'mixed' in any sense. They could give a shit about race, religion, sex, gender, sexual preference, none of it. I am not just imagining it, and my friends' children are the same. I was shocked to hear about a friend's DC who is going out with a DC of the opposite religion and gets a hard time from pupils in the friend's school!

You will find the well off from in and around Belfast etc will have holiday homes in Portrush and Portstewart, and they are student central. So I don't think what you are saying would hold true now.

I had one girl I'd been to school with take me to a Paisley service once (fuck me, that was scarey, I was sitting on my bloody hands so one didn't go up involuntarily when he thundered about whether we wanted to be saved!!!) I was 18 and green as the grass but when I didn't participate in the "silent collection", I thankfully wasn't asked back. Don't think I saw classmate again either! Nobody else has ever tried to convert me - other than Jehovah's witness and they get chased!

I don't think you spend enough time here to know how much it's changed. Not all of it. Don't think that ever will, because there are parents who had it bred into them now breeding it into their kids. But it is so, so much better!

@CollegeApplications You seem to have a very outdated, biased opinion of NI and are clinging on to your old experiences. You are massively projecting and it’s not helpful whatsoever to OP. Times have changed - the Belfast that I grew up in and the Belfast that my 20yo DD has grown up in are remarkably different.

Yes, catholic school in a rural town, it's not like there's much choice though, 99% of schools are religious, either Catholic or Protestant, the Protestant schools also had compulsory prayers in assembly every morning and other religious things....and most of NI is rural. Even Belfast has a small town mentality, other than maybe a few very specific areas, and even then you can't escape the sectarianism, even if you're not directly involved in circles when it's an issue. In July there are marches and rehearsals for marches that take over the city centre and other areas with trouble erupting every year, and not just 20 years ago, here's an article on it from 2024:

www.belfastlive.co.uk/news/belfast-news/belfast-disorder-sees-children-young-29557929.amp

I had to laugh at the "escaping being christened on the way to Spar", I know you meant it as a joke but it's actually true, in town there are regularly people handing out leaflets trying to recruit you to their church and anti abortion people with placards.
Literally the whole society is organised around religion and split along religious lines - education, politics, where you live, who your friends are. Politicians from one of the major political parties are creationists.
It really is another world to the rest of the Uk.
There might have been some changes over the past 20 years but fundamentally it's still not a very desirable place to live, despite the lovely scenery, which is why houses are cheaper than other areas of the Uk - there's not as much demand, and there are reasons for that.
Apart from the issues I've already mentioned there's a dearth of career opportunities for young people, a lot of my former classmates have either moved to other areas of the UK for work or had to abandon their career aspirations as they just can't get a job in their field.
This is also something to consider if moving there with kids. I think it's important that people hear all sides, not just the "lovely beaches and green hills", "friendly people" spiel.

@OzCalling Every opinion is biased, because opinions are subjective and based on an individual's experience, I'm just sharing mine. It's just as valid as the people saying how much they love NI and how it's a great place to live - that's also biased and subjective.
I don't believe my opinion is outdated - I go to see my parents in NI every year and any changes I've seen are superficial, under that it's still largely the same old place.
I think it's helpful to hear all sides, both the good and the bad, of course people are free to make their own decisions so if the OP wants to move there then fair enough, she may end up having a good experience, who knows.

Schools with a religious ethos aren't unusual in the UK - lots of posters in England post about this.

As I said above, I live in Bangor which is predominantly Protestant. DH and I are Catholic Atheists iykwim (and if you know anything about NI, ykwim). Our DC go to the local Protestant school as we didn't want Catholic education them (civil wedding, kids not christened). They're far from the only atheist kids, far from the only Catholic background kids, and indeed despite the Catholic school around the corner there are DC taking the Catholic sacraments outside school whose families obviously chose the school for non-religious reasons.

When we lived in Belfast we had more friends in mixed marriages than not.

Lots of families we know go to church, and have a faith that is important to them. They don't care that we don't go, we don't care that they do. The closest thing to conversion we've had is a neighbour inviting us to a breakfast with Santa in the church hall.

NI has moved on. Not everyone, not everywhere. But on the whole, especially in middle class areas, no one cares about the old divide.

As someone who only moved to NI long after the GFA I think NI should be much much prouder of itself than it is for how far it's come since the 90s. It's remarkable when you stop to think about it, a vanishingly rare achievement.

That is just so much bollocks! You are extremely negative about where you grew up.

I suppose the increase in integrated ed has passed you by, and did you fail to notice that voluntary grammars are not exclusively Protestant? (nor were they even when I went 50 years, Dalriada for the record!)

It's easy enough to avoid any political stuff, marches etc - I've been doing it most of my life! I have friends of all religions and none.

Have you any comment to make on the violence last summer in English cities? I suppose that's ok because it's not Prods v RC???!

This is all so inaccurate that it’s actually entertaining 🤣 I suggest you educate yourself before posting again and embarrassing yourself further, ignorance isn’t a good look. I’ll give you my DD’s school as an example - a very highly sought after voluntary grammar in south Belfast. It’s the largest, most diverse school in all of Ireland with over 1000 pupils from all backgrounds, religions and ethnicities. Such a huge ‘religious divide’ that DD and her peers didn’t even know the difference between catholics and protestants until they were taught about it in Y8.. nor could any of them care less which side of the fence their friends are from