Gender, Culture, and Politics after the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement

On 17 June 2013, Barack ObamaObama, Barack, President of the United States, delivered a speech to a crowd of young people at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast. In it, he sought to hold up Northern Ireland as a source of hope in a world suffering the consequences of the global economic recession of 2008. He declared that those gathered had ‘unique reasons to be hopeful’, for they were reaping the ‘economic and social benefits’ of the ‘courageous path towards a permanent peace’. He focussed in particular on Belfast’s transformed cityscape: