Cycling through Belfast city centre on a Black Friday weekend would normally have been nothing short of chaos. Scenes of eager shoppers packing Pandora and Zara like compressed sardines. Cheek to cheek, bag to bag, as the Kendal Jenner poster whispers “consume, consume, consume”.
Instead, pandemonium has been replaced with 'pandemic'. This is 2020, the time of Covid-19. What’s left is the remnants and the reality of a high-street savaged by lockdowns.
Close to a million people have been vaccinated in Northern Ireland and it is believed that as a result fewer people are in hospitals with Covid-19 and the death rate is low.
The usually crowded streets of the Holylands area are reasonably relaxed today on what is its most celebrated day of the year – St. Patricks Day – for the first time in years
There was a rise of 33.5 percent in suicide deaths between 2019 and 2020 according to a recently published research paper on suicide by the Northern Ireland Assembly.