Belfast: '1798 - A Belfast Rebellion' Walking Tour

Discover the history of the 1798 Rebellion on a walking tour of Belfast. Visit key sites, including St Mary’s Church and the Linen Hall Library, and learn about the United Irishmen.
Begin your journey at the gates of City Hall, where you’ll be transported back over two hundred years to imagine a Belfast that was beginning to expand through its shipping trade with the outside world. Linen, cotton, shipbuilding, and ropeworks were in their infancy, and Belfast citizens were attracted by the exotic imports of tobacco, rum, sugar, wine, and port.

Learn how the citizens of the town began to improve their living conditions by contributing their money and energies to form commercial and cultural associations that would give Belfast every advantage. The Society for Promoting Knowledge, later to become the Linen Hall Library, was one such cultural step forward in the form of a lending library. Former soldier, leading United Irishman, and librarian, Thomas Russell, was arrested on their premises in 1796 in an effort to prevent the rebellion.

Visit St Mary’s Church, Belfast’s first Roman Catholic Church, opened in May 1784, accompanied by a guard of honor from the mainly Presbyterian Belfast Volunteers. From there, it’s only a short distance to Rosemary Street, where there used to be three large Presbyterian Meeting Houses as well as the family home of the McCracken family.

Understand how the Presbyterian beliefs and democratic church structures contributed to their ability to reach out and support their fellow Roman Catholic citizens. Just a little further is the Exchange and Assembly Rooms, where important town meetings were held and few more important than the court martial of Henry Joy McCracken, following the failure of the Battle of Antrim. Having been found guilty, he would be hung later that day, and you will explore the site of this grisly event in High Street.

Other highlights include the Muddlers Club, St George’s Church, and Joy’s Entry, an experience that will make it easier to imagine a busy and charged atmosphere of a bustling town.

Return to City Hall and consider the impact that the rebellion had on Irish history and its context in the most recent “Troubles.” Try to understand how it has become a story which is misremembered and shunned, almost with a sense of shame, and yet it offered hope for a future of equality, liberty, and fraternity well ahead of our current expectations of fairness and human rights, now incorporated in the Good Friday Agreement.

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