The queue for a Belfast juice bar stretched out the door and on to Botanic Avenue by midmorning on Tuesday.
Teenagers wearing Dublin GAA jerseys were among customers shouting orders for pumpkin spice lattes above the roar of Talking Heads’ Psycho Killer booming from the speakers.
It is Freshers’ week in nearby Queen’s University Belfast and this avenue — where, six weeks ago, migrant businesses were attacked in a wave of racist violence across the south of the city — is thronged with students.
The bar’s main doors are flung open in the warm September sunshine and Niamh Aspinall is sitting at a table sipping an iced vanilla matcha.
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The 20-year-old from Kildare is a first-year nursing student at Queen’s university and is among the growing number of young people from the Republic opting to study in Northern Ireland.
At a time of severe nursing shortages in the North, Aspinall began her NHS-funded degree course in February.
The lure of a monthly £435 (€518) student nursing bursary, cheaper accommodation and a course that includes a hospital placement every six weeks, cemented her decision to move.
“I never knew Queen’s was a thing,” she says. “It was my mum who suggested it as my granny went to Queen’s. So I looked at it — and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be away from home — but honestly, it was the best thing I could have done. I love the independence that you have up here and it’s so much cheaper.”
She loves it so much that she has told friends at home that she will stay on in the North after she graduates.
“When you graduate, you can also work in the South but I don’t think I’d want to. I’d like to go away abroad first and then come back to Belfast,” she says.
Latest figures show that the number of Southern students taking up places in Northern universities has more than tripled over the past five years; Queen’s University Belfast recorded an increase from 99 new first-year students to 335 between 2019 and 2024.
Ulster University said its first-year intake from south of the Border increased from 265 to 629 across its four campuses at Magee, Coleraine, Jordanstown and Belfast, during the same period.
Aspinall is with her friend, Caoimhe, another Queen’s nursing student from Mayo, and they are waiting on a third friend, who is from Cork.
The trio are planning a night out on the Hatfield Bar on the Lower Ormeau Road.
“We’re all going out tonight and we’re all wearing our GAA jerseys, which we never do at home,” adds Aspinall.
“It’s funny but I feel like I’m more proud of being from the South when I’m up here”.
When Georgia Connon arrives, she admits she misses her hometown of Youghal in east Cork but insists she doesn’t regret her decision to move North.
“It takes me eight hours to get home on public transport — on a good day,” she says.
“I get homesick but I do love it up here. I think it’s a beautiful city. I knew I wanted to move away from home and have the college experience.”
She said that she was “yet to meet someone from Cork in Belfast … it’s a running joke”.
“We were out on Sunday and there were lads wearing the Cork [GAA] jersey. So I went up to them and asked what part of Cork they were from and one of them said, ‘Nah, I’m from Tyrone’. Most of the northerners are so welcoming and it sounds strange but the fact that we’re from the South is almost a conversation starter.”
Connon is in her first year of a three-year degree course in children’s nursing; her father is also a nurse and works at Cork University Hospital.
“We keep getting asked on our placements, ‘are you going to take your degree back home?’ I don’t know what I will do,” she says.
Across the road, seated areas are filled outside a cafe serving “avo on toast”, Belfast bap and home-made strawberry lemonade.
Hannah Tiernan from Co Louth is commuting from Dundalk to Belfast to study anthropology at Queen’s and is on her lunch break.
“I came North because I didn’t like the idea of Dublin, it’s too big,” she says.
“You walk down Botanic and can visit the book shops after a morning tutorial, get some lunch, go have a nosy, it’s all different little cafes, Greek, Turkish and Vietnamese places … it’s so nice.”
Waiting on tables is Donegal student Ben Paratian, who moved to Belfast two years ago to begin a politics degree before taking a year out to work in the caf.
He wants to pursue a film career and is beginning a new course in screen production.
“So I’m a fresher again and I’m telling you, it feels like Donegal up here. There’s not a day goes by without me seeing someone from home,” he says, laughing.
“I want go into film-making and with NI Screen and everything, there’s so many opportunities up here. It feels like I could actually live off it and get a real job from it, which I can’t believe. The North is so changed now, I feel like we have so many more people from the South up here; it’s just completely different.”
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