Belfast (from the Irish: Béal Feirste meaning "mouth of the sandbars") is the capital of and the largest city in Northern Ireland, a constituent country of the United Kingdom. It is the seat of devolved government and legislative Northern Ireland Assembly. It is the largest urban area in the province of Ulster, the second largest city on the island of Ireland and the 15th largest city in the United Kingdom. The city of Belfast has a population of 267,500, and lies at the heart of the Belfast urban area, which has a population of 483,418. The Belfast metropolitan area has a total population of 579,276. Belfast was granted city status in 1888.

Historically, Belfast has been a center for the Irish linen industry (earning the nickname "Linenopolis"), tobacco production, rope-making and shipbuilding: the city's main shipbuilders, Harland and Wolff, which built the ill-fated RMS Titanic, propelled Belfast onto the global stage in the early 20th century as the largest and most productive shipyard in the world. Belfast played a key role in the Industrial Revolution, establishing its place as a global industrial center until the latter half of the 20th century.

Industrialization and the inward migration it brought made Belfast, if briefly, the largest city in Ireland at the turn of the 20th century and the city's industrial and economic success was cited by Ulster Unionist opponents of home rule as a reason why Ireland should shun devolution and later why Ulster in particular would fight to resist it.

Today, Belfast remains a center for industry, as well as the arts, higher education and business, a legal center, and is the economic engine of Northern Ireland. The city suffered greatly during the period of disruption, conflict, and destruction called the Troubles, but latterly has undergone a sustained period of calm, free from the intense political violence of former years, and substantial economic and commercial growth. Belfast city center has undergone considerable expansion and regeneration in recent years, notably around Victoria Square.

Belfast is served by two airports: Belfast International Airport to the north-west of the city, and George Best Belfast City Airport in the east of the city.

Belfast is also a major seaport, with commercial and industrial docks dominating the Belfast Lough shoreline, including the famous Harland and Wolff shipyard.

Belfast is a constituent city of the Dublin-Belfast corridor with a population of 3 million, comprising of half the total population of the island of Ireland.

The name Belfast is derived from the Irish Béal Feirsde, which was later spelled Béal Feirste. The word Béal means "mouth" while Feirsde/Feirste is plural and refers to a sandbar or ford across a river's mouth. The name would thus translate as "mouth (of the) sandbars" or "mouth (of the) fords". These sandbars formed where two rivers met (at what is now Donegall Quay) and flowed into Belfast Lough. This area was the hub around which the settlement developed. 

It is a common misconception that Belfast was simply named after the River Farset, which flows through the city. However, it would appear that both the settlement and the river were named after these sandbar crossings.

The history of Belfast as a settlement goes back to the Bronze Age, but its status as a major urban center dates to the eighteenth century. Belfast today is the capital of Northern Ireland. Belfast was, throughout its modern history, a major commercial and industrial center. It suffered in the late twentieth century from a decline in its traditional industries, particularly shipbuilding. The city's history has been marked by violent conflict between Catholic and Protestant communities which has caused many parts of the city to be split into 'Catholic' and 'Protestant' areas. In recent years the city has been relatively peaceful and major redevelopment has occurred, especially the inner-city and dock areas.

The site of Belfast has been occupied since the Bronze Age. The Giant's Ring, a 5000 year old hinge, is located near the city, and the remains of Iron Age hill forts can still be seen in the surrounding hills. It became a substantial settlement in the 17th century after being settled by English and Scottish settlers at the same time as the Plantation of Ulster.

The original Belfast Castle was at what is now Castle Junction, where several roads meet at the top of High Street. This was demolished at the same time as the River Farset was covered over to create High Street. There is a new castle on the slopes of the Cavehill above the Antrim and Shore roads, which is now a popular location for wedding receptions.

According to the city's official history (as seen on a plaque outside St. George's Church), the original settlement was based around the marshy ford where the River Lagan met the River Farset (also called the Belfast River), which today would be where High Street meets Victoria Street. The current Church of Ireland church there (St. George's) is thought to be on the site of an ancient chapel used by pilgrims crossing the waters. The castle was later added to protect and dominate this position. Maps from the 17th century suggest that the Lagan was narrowed at this point (so deepening it and making the Farset navigable) at some time before 1680.

In the early 17th century, Belfast was settled by English and Scottish settlers, under a plan by Sir Arthur Chichester. After the 1641 Rebellion, many Scots who had come to Ulster as part of the Scottish army sent to put down the rebellion, settled in Belfast after the Irish Confederate Wars. Belfast was later settled by a small number of French Huguenots fleeing persecution, who established a sizable linen trade.

Belfast thrived in the 18th century as a merchant town, importing goods from Great Britain and exporting the produce of the linen trade. Linen at the time was made by small producers in rural areas. The town was also a center of radical politics, partly because its predominantly Presbyterian population was discriminated against under the penal laws, and also because of the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment. Belfast saw the founding of the Irish Volunteers in 1778 and the Society of the United Irishmen in 1791 - both dedicated to democratic reform, an end to religious discrimination and greater independence for Ireland. As a result of intense repression however, Belfast radicals played little or no role in the Irish Rebellion of 1798.

In the 19th century, Belfast became Ireland's pre-eminent industrial city with linen, heavy engineering, tobacco and shipbuilding dominating the economy. Belfast, located at the western end of Belfast Lough and at the mouth of the River Lagan, was an ideal location for the shipbuilding industry, which was dominated by the Harland and Wolff company which alone employed up to 35,000 workers and was one of the largest shipbuilders in the world. The ill-fated RMS Titanic was built there in 1911. Migrants to Belfast came from across Ireland, Scotland and England, but particularly from rural Ulster, where sectarian tensions ran deep. The same period saw the first outbreaks of sectarian riots, which have recurred regularly since.

The City Hall during construction

Although the county borough of Belfast was created when it was granted city status by Queen Victoria in 1888, the city continues to be viewed as straddling County Antrim and County Down. By 1901, Belfast was the largest city in Ireland. The city's importance was evidenced by the construction of the lavish City Hall, completed in 1906. Since around 1840 its population included many Catholics, who originally settled in the west of city, around the area of today's Barrack Street. West Belfast remains the center of the city's Catholic population (in contrast with the east of the City which is predominantly Protestant). Other areas of Catholic settlement have included parts of the north of the city, especially Ardoyne and the Antrim Road and the Markets area immediately to the south of the city center.

Conditions for the new working class were often squalid, with much of the population packed into overcrowded and unsanitary tenements. The city suffered from repeated cholera outbreaks in the mid-19th century. Conditions improved somewhat after a wholesale slum clearance program in the 1900s.

Belfast saw a bitter strike by dock workers organized by radical trade unionist Jim Larkin, in 1907. The dispute saw 10,000 workers on strike and a mutiny by the police, who refused to disperse the striker's pickets. Eventually the Army had to be deployed to restore order. The strike was a rare instance of non-sectarian mobilization in Ulster at the time.

In 1912, the British Parliament passed the Third Home Rule Bill, which would have given limited autonomy to an all-Ireland Irish Parliament. Unionists, led by Edward Carson raised a militia, the Ulster Volunteers, to resist this, by force if necessary. The political crisis heightened tensions in Belfast and rioting took place in city in July of that year.

It was then proposed that Ireland would be partitioned, with unionists demanding that the six north-eastern counties of Ireland (four of which had Protestant majorities) would be excluded from Home Rule. Home Rule and Partition had been accepted in principle by 1914, but were postponed until the end of the First World War.

Following the end of the War and radicalization of Irish nationalist politics after the Easter Rising of 1916, the issues of Irish independence and the partition of Ireland again came to prominence. The separatist Sinn Fein party won a majority of seats in Ireland, though not in Ulster, where in Belfast nationalists continued to vote for members of the Irish Parliamentary Party and unionists for the Unionist Party. Thereafter a guerrilla war developed between the British state in Ireland and the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Under the Government of Ireland Act 1920, Ireland was partitioned into Protestant-dominated Northern Ireland (the six most-Protestant counties of the province of Ulster) and the Catholic-dominated rest of the country. James Craig was Northern Ireland's first Prime Minister.

The period immediately before and after partition was marked by major sectarian conflict in Belfast, and some areas became much more dominated by one religious group. Although siding with the Irish War of Independence, the Belfast conflict had a nature all of its own. Unlike the rest of Ireland, where the war was largely fought between the IRA and Crown forces, around 90% of the 465 deaths in Belfast were civilians, as the violence often took the form sectarian assassinations and also of armed clashes between Catholic and Protestants.

The conflict began in Belfast in July 1920. On 21 July 1920, rioting broke out in the city, starting in the shipyards and alter spreading to residential areas. The violence was partly in response to the IRA killing of a northern RIC police officer Gerald Smyth, in Cork, and partly because of competition over jobs due to the high unemployment rate. loyalists marched on the Harland and Wolff shipyards in Belfast and forced over 7,000 Catholic and left-wing Protestant workers from their jobs. Sectarian rioting broke out in response in Belfast resulting in about 20 deaths in just three days. Both Catholics and Protestants were also expelled from their homes in the trouble. The IRA assassination of an RIC Detective, Swanzy, in nearby Lisburn on August 22 prompted another round of clashes, in which 33 people died in the city over the following 10 days. The violence led to the reviving of the Ulster Volunteer Force, a unionist militia first formed in 1912. Thereafter there were recurring cycles of violence until the summer of 1922.

In response to this violence, southern nationalists imposed a boycott on goods produced in Belfast. In Northern Ireland, an auxiliary police force, the Ulster Special Constabulary was recruited for counter-insurgency purposes.

The year 1921 saw three major flare ups in Belfast. Just before the Truce that formally ended the Irish War of Independence on July 11, Belfast suffered a day of violence known at the time as Belfast's, 'Bloody Sunday'. An IRA ambush of an armored police truck on Raglan Street killed one RIC man, injured two more and destroyed their armored car. This sparked a day of ferocious fighting in west Belfast on the following day, Sunday 10 July, in which 16 civilians; 11 Catholics and 5 Protestants, lost their lives and 161 houses were destroyed . Gun battles raged all day along the sectarian 'boundary' between the Falls and Shankill Roads and rival gunmen used rifles, machine guns and hand grenades in the clashes. Another 4 died over the following two days  The second spike in violence came in three days from August 29 to September 1, in which 20 people were killed and the third in November, when more than 30 died. In the November violence, the IRA bombed city trams taking Protestant workers to the shipyards, killing 7 people.

The violence peaked in the first half of 1922, after the Anglo-Irish Treaty confirmed the partition of Ireland into Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State. Michael Collins the Free State leader, sent arms and aid to the northern IRA with the aim both of trying to defend the Catholic population there and trying to destabilize Northern Ireland. Roughly 30 people were killed in Belfast in February 1922, 60 in March and another 30 in April. The IRA actions in Belfast, such as the killing of policemen, resulted in retaliation with attacks on the Roman Catholic population by loyalists, sometimes covertly aided by state forces. The McMahon Murders of 26 March 1922, and the Arnon Street Massacre of a week later, in which uniformed police shot a total of 12 Catholic civilians dead in reprisal for the killings of policemen, were two of the worst such incidents.

Two factors contributed to the rapid end to the conflict. One was the collapse of the IRA in the face of the Northern state's use of internment without trial. The second was the outbreak of the Irish Civil War in the south, which distracted the IRA's attention from the North and largely ended the violence there.

According to historian Robert Lynch's count, a total of 465 people died in Belfast in the conflict of 1920-22. A further 1,091 were wounded. Of the dead, 159 were Protestant civilians, 258 Catholic civilians, 35 Crown forces and 12 IRA members.

As the largest city in Ulster, Belfast became the capital of Northern Ireland, and a grand parliament building was constructed at Stormont in 1932. The Government of Northern Ireland was dominated by upper and middle class unionists.

As a result of this, conditions in the poorer parts of Belfast remained bad, with many houses being damp, overcrowded and lacking in basic amenities such as hot water and indoor toilets until about the 1970s.

In common with similar cities worldwide, Belfast suffered particularly during the Great Depression. Partly as a result of these economic tensions, in the 1930s, there was another round of sectarian rioting in the city, although the most significant unrest of the period, the Outdoor Relief Riots of 1932, was notable for its non-sectarian nature.

Monument to USAEF (United States of America Expeditionary Force)
and rededication plaque by U.S. President Bill Clinton, grounds
of Belfast City Hall

During the Second World War, Belfast was one of the major cities in the United Kingdom bombed by German forces. The British government had thought that Northern Ireland would be safe from German bombing because of its distance from German positions, and so very little was done to prepare Belfast for air raids. Few bomb shelters were built and the few anti-aircraft guns the city possessed were sent to England. The Belfast Blitz occurred on Easter Tuesday, April 15, 1941, when two hundred German Luftwaffe bombers attacked the city, pounding working class areas of Belfast around the shipyards. About one thousand people died and many more were injured. Of Belfast's housing stock, 52% was destroyed, outside London, this was the greatest loss of life in a single raid during the war. Roughly 100,000 of the population of 415,000 became homeless. Belfast was targeted due to its concentration of heavy shipbuilding and aerospace industries. Ironically, the same period saw the economy recover as the war economy saw great demand for the products of these industries.

The post-war years were relatively placid in Belfast, but sectarian tensions and resentment among the Catholic population at widespread discrimination festered below the surface, and the city erupted into violence in August 1969 when vicious sectarian rioting broke out in the city. The perceived one-sidedness of the police and the failure of the IRA to defend Catholic neighborhoods of the city was one of the main causes of the formation of the militant Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), which would subsequently launch an armed campaign against the state of Northern Ireland.

The violence intensified in the early 1970s, with rival paramilitary groups being formed on both sides. Bombing, assassination and street violence formed a backdrop to life throughout The Troubles. The PIRA detonated twenty-two bombs, all in a confined area in the city center in 1972, on what is known as "Bloody Friday" killing nine people. Loyalists paramilitaries, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and Ulster Defense Association (UDA) retaliated against the PIRA campaign by killing Catholics at random. A particularly notorious group, based on the Shankill Road in the mid 1970s became known as the Shankill Butchers.

The Army, first deployed in 1969 to restore order, became a feature of Belfast life, with huge fortified barracks being constructed, predominantly in nationalist west Belfast. Initially the Army was welcomed by the minority nationalist community, but the relationship soured after such incidents as the Falls Curfew of July 1970, when the Army fought a three-day gun battle with the Official IRA in the Falls Road area, resulting in four deaths. Major confrontation continued between the Army and Republican paramilitaries throughout the 1970s, notably in Operation Motorman in 1972, when the Army re-took nationalist "no-go areas" in Belfast and elsewhere.

In the early 1970s, there were huge forced population movements as families, mostly but not exclusively Roman Catholic, living in areas dominated by the other community were intimidated from their homes, either directly or indirectly through general fear. The general decline in European manufacturing industry of the early 1980s, exacerbated by political violence, devastated the city's economy. As recently as 1971 the city was overwhelmingly Protestant, but today is almost evenly balanced due to higher Catholic birth rates and rising prosperity, together with Protestant emigration (both internal, e.g., to North Down and external) have fundamentally changed the balance.

In 1981, Bobby Sands a native of Greater Belfast, was the first of ten Republican prisoners to die on hunger strike in pursuit of political status. The event provoked major rioting in nationalist areas of the city. During the 1980s, the most notorious series of incidents in the city took place within a week in 1988. Firstly, a Republican funeral was attacked by loyalist Michael Stone (see Milltown Cemetery attack), then, the following week at the funerals of Stone's victims, two off-duty soldiers were lynched in the "corporals killings".

In the early 1990s, loyalist and republican paramilitaries in the city stepped up their killings of each other and "enemy" civilians. A cycle of killing continued right up to the PIRA ceasefire in August 1994 and the Combined Loyalist Military Command cessation six weeks later. The most horrific single attack of this period came in October 1993, when the PIRA bombed a fish shop on the Shankill Road in an attempt to kill the UDA leadership. The Shankill Road bombing instead killed nine Protestant shoppers as well as one of the bombers.

Despite the paramilitary ceasefires of 1994, today the city still remains scarred by the conflict between the two communities. In all, nearly 1,500 people have been killed in political violence in the city from 1969 until the present. Most of Belfast is highly segregated with enclaves of one community surrounded by another (e.g., Protestant Glenbryn estate in North Belfast, and the Catholic Short Strand in east Belfast) feeling under siege. Fitful paramilitary activity continues, often directed inwards as in the loyalist feuds and the killing of Catholic Robert McCartney by PIRA members in December 2004.

In 1997, unionists lost control of Belfast City Council for the first time in its history,  with the  Alliance Party  of Northern Ireland gaining the balance of

Lagan Weir, a major catalyst for redevelopment
  of the Laganside area and increasing use
of the river throughout the city

power between nationalists and unionists. This position was confirmed in the council elections of 2001 and 2005. Since then it has had two Catholic mayors, one from the Social Democratic and Labor Party (SDLP) and one from Sinn Féin.

The city in general has seen significant redevelopment and investment since the Belfast Agreement. The formation of the Laganside Corporation in 1989 heralded the start of the regeneration of the River Lagan and its surrounding areas. Other areas that have been transformed include the Cathedral Quarter and the Victoria Square area. However communal segregation has continued since then, with occasional low level street violence in isolated flashpoints and the construction of new Peace Lines.

Belfast saw the worst of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. However, since the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, there has been major redevelopment in the city including Victoria Square, the Titanic Quarter and Laganside as well as the Odyssey complex and the landmark Waterfront Hall.