Why the Falls Road Is Home to Ireland's Biggest Irish Language School - and One of Belfast's Coolest Neighbourhoods

Most visitors who come to the Falls Road in West Belfast are here for one thing: the murals. And fair enough, they’re extraordinary. But spend a bit more time in the area, and you’ll notice something else going on entirely, something that has nothing to do with the past and everything to do with where the neighbourhood is heading. Street signs in two languages. A radio station broadcasting in Irish. Cafés where (on some days) you’ll hear as much Gaeilge as English at the next table. And, tucked just off the road itself, the biggest Irish-language school on the entire island of Ireland, north or south.

This is the Falls Road most visitors never hear about: not a place defined by its past, but a genuinely thriving, growing, occasionally chaotic community that decided decades ago to bring a language back from the brink, and succeeded far beyond anyone’s expectations.

If you’d like the fuller story of how Belfast got here, my city centre walking tour covers the boom, the bloodshed, and the comeback in more depth, starting from Grand Central Station and ending at the Grand Opera House.

Coláiste Feirste: From Nine Pupils to the Biggest Gaelscoil in Ireland

Coláiste Feirste is Belfast’s only Irish-medium secondary school, and remarkably, it’s now recognised as the biggest gaelscoil (Irish-language school) anywhere in Ireland, north or south of the border. That’s not a small claim. It’s outgrown every similar school in Dublin, Cork, Galway, and everywhere else the Irish language is taught.

It didn’t start that way. The school opened in 1991 with just nine pupils, operating out of a repurposed building on the Falls Road. Today it educates several hundred students, taking in well over 150 new first-years most autumns, and it’s grown so quickly that the school has had to install extra mobile classrooms just to keep pace with demand. The Department of Education has been openly criticised by the school’s own principal for failing to plan for a second Irish-medium secondary school in Belfast, because Coláiste Feirste alone simply cannot keep up with how many families want a place.

That’s a remarkable turnaround for a language that, within living memory, was in genuine decline in the north of Ireland.

Welcome to the Gaeltacht Quarter

Coláiste Feirste doesn’t exist in isolation. It’s the flagship of what’s officially known as Belfast’s Gaeltacht Quarter, a stretch of the Falls Road and Andersonstown area that has become the beating heart of Irish-language life in the city. A Gaeltacht, traditionally, refers to an Irish-speaking region in the west or south of Ireland. Belfast’s version has no official government boundary, but on the ground, it feels every bit as real.

Within a short walk of each other, you’ll find several Irish-medium primary schools, an Irish-language radio station called Raidió Fáilte, bilingual shopfronts, bus stops in both languages, and Cultúrlann McAdam Ó Fiaich, a cultural centre housed in a former Presbyterian church that now hosts an art gallery, a theatre, a bookshop, and a restaurant, all functioning as the unofficial living room of the neighbourhood.

Since the 1980s, Belfast, and specifically this part of the city, has had a stronger statistical concentration of Irish speakers than anywhere else in Northern Ireland.

The James Connolly Visitor Centre: A Museum Next Door to History, Not On Top of It

Also on the Falls Road, and well worth building time into your visit, is Áras Uí Chonghaile, the James Connolly Visitor Centre. It’s a common assumption that the centre occupies Connolly’s actual home. It doesn’t, and the centre is upfront about this: the building is a lavishly converted former corner shop and post office, standing only a few yards from the lodgings where Connolly actually lived between 1910 and 1916. The Connolly family home was 420 Glenalina Terrace (opposite the main entrance to the City Cemetery), and apparently it was regularly visited by several of his comrades, including the Countess Markievicz. She even referred to the house as her second home, as she felt very much part of the Connolly family, along with other men and women who would go on to play an active role in the 1916 Rising.

I often imagine them all sitting around the kitchen table, probably plotting and planning what would eventually become the 1916 Rising in Ireland. They may even have popped over to the famous Rock Bar, on the opposite side of the street - which, incidentally, is one of the most famous and oldest pubs along the Falls Road and is still operating today.

In case you don’t know who James Connolly is, let me tell you a little about him: James Connolly was born in Edinburgh in 1868 to Irish parents, and rose to become one of the most significant figures in Irish and international labour history. Long before he became a household name in Dublin, he spent formative years in Belfast organising dock and linen mill workers for the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, work that shaped the socialist politics he carried through the rest of his life. He went on to help lead the 1913 Dublin Lockout alongside Jim Larkin, co-founded the Irish Citizen Army, and became one of the seven signatories of the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic. Badly wounded during the Easter Rising, he was executed by firing squad in Dublin in May 1916, tied to a chair because his injuries meant he could no longer stand. His death, and the manner of it, changed everything. Public opinion in Dublin had actually been hostile to the Rising itself, with rebels jeered as they were marched off to prison. But the British response turned that sentiment on its head: fifteen leaders were executed over ten days, and Connolly, so badly injured he had to be carried to the courtyard and shot while strapped to a chair, became the starkest symbol of it. Within a few short years, that shift in public feeling helped fuel the rise of Sinn Féin and the War of Independence. A rebellion with little public support at Easter 1916 had, by its aftermath, set Ireland on the road to independence.

The centre itself opened in 2019, officially launched by Irish President Michael D. Higgins, and holds a genuinely unique collection, including one of the only complete original copies of the 1916 Proclamation on public display anywhere, alongside a half-Proclamation and the original printing blocks used to produce it. There’s an interactive exhibition, a dedicated library of Connolly’s own writings, and a café that doubles as a community space for music sessions and talks. It’s a thoughtful, well-curated stop, and one that connects Belfast directly to the story of the Easter Rising, a story most visitors only associate with Dublin.

Learn a Few Words of Irish Before You Go

You won’t need Irish to get by on the Falls Road, but locals will always appreciate the effort. A handful of words go a long way:

• Dia duit - Hello (literally, “God be with you”)
• Go raibh maith agat - Thank you
• Slán - Goodbye
• Cad é mar atá tú? - How are you? (the Ulster way of asking, slightly different from Irish taught further south)
• Tá mé go maith - I’m good
• Le do thoil - Please
• Sláinte - Cheers / good health - the word you’ll hear most often, usually raised alongside a pint

A Culture, Not Just a Curriculum

The language revival here isn’t confined to classrooms. Every August, the area hosts Féile an Phobail, one of the largest community arts festivals in Ireland, with music, comedy, debates, and walking tours drawing tens of thousands of visitors over two weeks. There’s a local GAA scene, Irish-medium youth clubs, a reading circle, a cycling club, and several pubs where trad sessions are as much a fixture of the week as the football scores.

The area’s cultural profile has also gone properly global in recent years. The 2024 film Kneecap, based on the real-life Irish-language rap trio from West Belfast, is set right here in the Gaeltacht Quarter, and became the first Irish-language film ever to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. Whatever you make of the group themselves, it’s a sign of how this once-overlooked corner of Belfast has become something people the world over are genuinely curious about.

So, Is the Falls Road Really the Coolest Place to Live in Belfast?

Ask people who actually live there, and you’ll get a confident yes, and it’s less about nostalgia than momentum. This is a neighbourhood with a strong, self-generated sense of identity and an equally strong sense of community, where it is still common to find several generations of the same family living on the same street. Property here has stayed relatively affordable compared to trendier corners of South Belfast, and the community infrastructure - schools, cultural centres, festivals, sports clubs - is arguably denser than almost anywhere else in the city.

It also helps that the area has quietly become one of the more creative, youthful pockets of Belfast, with independent cafés and a genuine live music and arts scene growing up around the language revival rather than in spite of it. For a lot of people raising families here, the appeal isn’t complicated: good schools, strong community, real culture, and a sense that the neighbourhood is still being built rather than already finished.

Experiencing It as a Visitor

You don’t need a word of Irish to enjoy this side of the Falls Road. A visit to Cultúrlann McAdam Ó Fiaich is a good starting point, with its café, gallery, and bookshop giving a relaxed, low-key introduction to the area’s cultural life. The James Connolly Visitor Centre is an easy add-on nearby, and if your visit coincides with early August, Féile an Phobail is well worth building a trip around. And of course, The Rock Bar is well worth a stop for a pint of the black stuff and a chat with a friendly barman! Keep an ear out as you walk: bilingual signage and the occasional snatch of conversation in Irish are both small, easy-to-miss signs of just how alive this language is here, day to day, on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon.

It’s a different side of the Falls Road to the one most guidebooks focus on. The Falls Road even earned a visit from the legendary Anthony Bourdain in the “Ireland” episode of No Reservations - and if that doesn’t give it serious cool points, I don’t know what does!

And if this is your first time hearing about Belfast’s remarkable comeback story, start in the city centre with my city centre walking tour, tracing the city from industrial boom town, through the Troubles, to the confident, reinvented Belfast of today. And of course if you want to visit the murals I mentioned at the start of this article you can always download my Peace Walls Walking Tour.

Out of time for today and back to the day job of being your No. 1 Walking & Talking Tour Guide.

Slán abhaile!

And remember… Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam - a country without a language is a country without a soul.

Happy touring!

Lucie