County Antrim
Aontroim
- IrishAontroim
- ProvinceUlster
- County townCarrickfergus, historically
- Local governmentNo county council since 1973. The county lies in six districts: Mid and East Antrim; Causeway Coast and Glens; Antrim and Newtownabbey; Lisburn and Castlereagh; Belfast; Armagh City, Banbridge and Craigavon
- Area3,098 km²
- Population651,321 (2021)
- Highest pointTrostan, 550 m
Douglass in Belfast
Frederick Douglass reached Belfast in December 1845, near the end of four months in Ireland. He stayed into the new year and spoke more than once.
The town welcomed him. Then he turned to its churches. The Free Church of Scotland had taken money from slaveholding congregations in the American South, and Douglass pressed the Presbyterian and Congregational bodies about it, hard.
Send back the money was the cry. It made him enemies among the people who had welcomed him.
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Carrickfergus Castle
Begun by John de Courcy soon after he invaded Ulster in 1177.
King John besieged it in 1210 and Edward Bruce in 1315. Schomberg took it for William III in 1689, and the French under Thurot took it in 1760.
The army used it until 1928. In the Second World War it held air raid shelters. It is one of the best preserved medieval buildings in Ireland.
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Otto Jaffe
He was born in Hamburg in 1846 and came to Belfast with the family linen business. He was elected to the corporation in 1894.
In 1899 Otto Jaffe became Lord Mayor of Belfast. He was the first Jewish Lord Mayor of the city, and so far the only one. A year later he was knighted and made high sheriff.
Then came the war. In 1916, with feeling against Germans at its height, he and his family left for England. He died there in 1929. A blue plaque on Donegall Square South now remembers him.
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Isaac Herzog in Belfast
Before Dublin there was Belfast. Isaac Herzog came to the Belfast congregation as its rabbi in 1915 and stayed four years.
The usual story puts his arrival in 1916. The Dictionary of Irish Biography says 1915.
His son Chaim was born in the city in 1918. He became the sixth President of Israel.
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Read further
Isaac Herzog arrived in Belfast in 1915 and learned the language of the country. Organised Irish temperance also began in Ulster, nine years before Cork.