Belfast or Beal Fierste, is obviously the capital city of my home country of Northern Ireland. That home will always be the original Belfast – where the name began, just like New York is really just York with skyscrapers. So around the world there have been scattered a few “Bangors” and “Belfasts”, and spontaneously I…
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I only started taking a camera to Northern Ireland matches at the end of the 1990s. It’s amazing how the world has changed over the years, in that now almost everyone at the match will have a mobile phone/camera. These are the only two photos I took at the Canada match back in 1999. My…
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My second time in Hobart was three months after my first time. And I’ll be back again next week to watch the World Cup with a Northern Irish mate. It’s a city that has grown on me, or what I mean is I didn’t like it much at the start and now I do. I…
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Northern Ireland 1-0 England 7th September 2005. David Healy 74 I was of course there in Windsor Park in the Kop the night we beat the England. I attended every Northern Ireland home match from January 1997 to September 2009. I had written a report on this match for a magazine in 2005 which was…
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IT was a basic, happy existence supporting an Irish League team. My team is Glentoran, and I have supported them all my life. The Glens are one of the “Belfast Big Two” (along with rivals Linfield) and are one of the most successful Irish football clubs of all time, and the second most successful Northern…
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Often I feel quite proud of my country’s capital city of Belfast and the history and changes in it through the years. The part of Belfast I most associate with is East Belfast, which itself has so much history, culture and worldwide fame. Stuff you might not even be aware of, such as The Titanic,…
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“The living daylights” – James Bond movie / A-Ha. This is the scariest blog post to date, and looking back at this event scared the living daylights out of me. I guess most of us will have known someone or have been in a car accident at some point in their lives. According to DingGo,…
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In the year 2000 there was a huge buzz. A new millennium, a new century, people started being able to afford mobile phones, I used the internet, and more importantly I ceased to be a teenager! I was now 20. In that year, I worked for 48 weeks in Tesco at Springhill as a stock…
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Growing up in Northern Ireland meant going to church, the local Ballycrochan Presbyterian Church in Bangor (perhaps ironic now as I usually attend Catholic churches in Poland – Presbyterian is a branch of Protestantism – all Christian none-the-less). I was a member of 10th Bangor Boys Brigade (BB) from 1990 – 1999 (before this I…
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In my life I’ve been to four Northern Ireland v. Spain matches. It seems we are two teams that are nearly always drawn against each other. For example in every World Cup between 1982 and 1994 we were either in the same group in the actual tournament or in qualifying. We even had Spain in…
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