Ben Lowry: Belfast must ban the blaring buskers and street preachers who have been allowed almost to destroy the city centre with noise pollution

I was in Belfast city centre working, as I am several days a week, and the sunny skies were so pleasant that I decided to go to get a sandwich in a cafe and enjoy the happy atmosphere.

Our office is based near Cornmarket, so one lunch I walked down towards it, on one of the finest days of 2026, and found an outlet that serves hot drinks and food. It was such a sunny day I thought I would sit outside to enjoy it and watch the world go by. But I didn't. Why?

There was a musician blaring in the square, as there is most days. The output was so loud that it would have been impossible just to sit there without having any sense of peace and rest disrupted by it.

The way in which Belfast city council has lost control of this noise pollution for many years, since before lockdown, is appalling. The debate that has arisen about this dreadful noise is just as bad, and has descended into a bogus row over buskers and street preachers.

The city centre has almost been ruined in daytime as a result of this blaring noise.

Let me give some background on my thinking here, and why I go so far as to say that the city centre has been almost destroyed by sound.

Belfast is one of the most handsome city centres in these islands. I struggle to think of any regional cities that are as well laid out as the central part of our capital city. There are, of course, various towns and cities in the British Isles with far grander architecture, such as Edinburgh and Oxford and Cambridge and Dublin, let alone that vast metropolis London, where the good buildings go on for miles. But while there are various northern cities, including Liverpool and Manchester and Leeds that - like Belfast - have multiple attractive Victorian and Edwardian buildings, none of them are as well designed as Belfast.

What geographers call the 'central business district' is, in Belfast, a joy. From the BBC on Ormeau Avenue, down Bedford Street and the parallel grid streets, to the city hall, Belfast opens up to a magnificent civic centre and grounds, surrounded by elegant, even beautiful buildings, that are protected by conservation laws (never doubt for a moment that there are developers, supported by politicians who, without those legal protections, would flatten those buildings and put up an ugly cheap replacement if they could make millions out of it).

Heading west, north or east from Belfast city hall, there are big straight boulevards with many fine buildings (even though some of the greats from the past have since been demolished by World War II, the Troubles or by developer vandalism, endorsed by weak planners).

I say all this at such length to explain why I have loved Belfast since I was a child. I feel fortunate to work in such a place, that is small enough to be intimate and large enough to be bustling.

Is it too much to ask that those of us who want to go to shops, to work, or merely to walk around the centre in our spare time should be able to do so without blaring speakers?

Note that I do not specify preachers and I do not specify musicians. They are equally bad. They use speakers that ratchet up the volume to intolerable volumes.

As it happens, I do not share the beliefs of the fire and brimstone preachers, yet I have a happy memory of listening to Ian Paisley preach outside Belfast city hall while I sat with two school pals from sixth form at the end of the 1990s. He spoke without a microphone and was not intrusive. The man was a brilliant orator.

That for me should be the rule: musicians and Bible speakers should need a licence so that there is sufficient distance between each one. And they should not be allowed any amplification.

If they are good musicians and speakers, then they should be able to project themselves and any musical instruments they play.

Then those who want to listen can enjoy it and the rest of us can enjoy the ambiance of a pretty but non-blaring city.

Sadly, however, there is an apparent stalemate in Belfast's noise restrictions between those who seem only to be bothered by Christian preachers who are loud and others who seem only to be interested in defending those preachers.

Both noisy preachers and noisy buskers should be penalised at the current volumes, which are so loud they currently intrude into offices more than 100 metres away, and several stories above street level.

• Ben Lowry (@Benlowry2) is News Letter editor