Photos

I continue my trip in Northern Ireland, I am now in Belfast, capital and largest city of Northern Ireland. I was nicely surprised with Belfast, because of the Troubles that occurred in the city on last decades and gave a bad vision of it to many people, including me. But it is a nice town, with nice people, a nice place to live I think. To have a quick idea about what you could see in the city, I bought a ticket for a live guided tour on a double-decker bus. So this photo was taken from the second deck of the bus, while some pessengers stepped down from the bus.

We are in Stormont, a neighbourhood in the east of Belfast city. It gave its name to the big building you can see on the photo. It is the seat of Northern Ireland Assembly and Northern Ireland Executive. Stormont was opened in 1932 as home for Parliament of Northern Ireland, home rule legislature of Northern Ireland. The parliament was suspended in 1972 because of Troubles, then abolished in 1973. Its powers were reverted to Westminster until Good Friday Agreement in 1998 that created a new legislature for Nothern Ireland : Northern Ireland Assembly aka the Assembly. Disagreements between the two unionist parties (Democratic Unionist Party and Ulster Unionist Party) and the republican party (Sinn Fein) caused the Assembly to be suspended on several occasions, the longest being for a period of four years and half, from october 2002 to may 2007. The last elections occurred in march 2007. The Assembly is a unicameral, democratically elected body comprising 108 members who are known as Members of the Legislative Assembly, or MLAs. Members are elected under the single transferable vote form of proportional representation (a complex vote form, see Wikipedia if you want to know more about this). The Assembly has leglislative powers in some matters that are not reserved to Westminster, the United Kingdom parliament. So the Assembly has power to legislate on education, health, agriculture, enterprise, trade, investment, environment, regional development (including transports), employment, finance, social developement, culture, arts and leisure. Other matters (called Excepted matters) could be transfered to the Assembly in future while others (called Reserved matters) will always be within the competence of Westminster. The Assembly has also responsibility for electing the Northern Ireland Executive. Not an easy work since each party is entitled to a share of ministerial positions roughly proportionate to its share of seats in the Assembly !