2 Best Sights in Northern Ireland

Fresh from a dazzling £12 million face-lift and just in time for its 125th anniversary, Belfast's opera house, which regularly hosts musicals, plays, and concerts, has been restored to its original 1890s glamour with a new auditorium and ornate boxes. Visitors can now appreciate the beauty of the plasterwork alongside repairs and repainting of decorative features such as elephant heads and the glorious ceilings devised by the renowned theater architect Frank Matcham in 1894. New purpose-designed seats have replaced the old cinema-style ones in use since the 1960s and stalls, circle crush bars, sound, lighting, sets, and scenery were all upgraded. An impressive new permanent display reflects many of the famous names who have taken to this stage including Laurel and Hardy and Luciano Pavarotti. The building, which had already achieved listed status for its architectural merit and is Northern Ireland's only remaining Victorian theater, now takes its place among the city's premier attractions.

The excellent Ulster American Folk Park re-creates a Tyrone village of two centuries ago, a log-built American settlement of the same period, and the docks and ships that the emigrants to America would have used. The centerpiece is an old whitewashed cottage, now a museum, which is the ancestral home of Thomas Mellon (1813–1908), the U.S. banker and philanthropist. Another thatch cottage is a reconstruction of the boyhood home of Archbishop John Hughes, founder of New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral. There are full-scale replicas of Irish peasant cottages, a New York tenement room, immigrant transport ship holders, plus a 19th-century Ulster village, complete with staff dressed in period costumes. The Mellon Centre for Migration Studies contains 16,000 books and periodicals, an Irish emigration database including passenger lists from 1800 to 1860, emigrant letters, and maps of geographical regions of both Ireland and America. Other notable exhibits include William Murray's drapery store and W. G. O'Doherty's original candy store on the bustling Ulster Street, where visitors can explore the world of retail therapy in the early 1900s.