A dispatch from Belfast, a city divided by religion, and thronged with megaphones and placards.
In 2023, a video from the streets of Belfast went viral. Filmed during the city’s Pride parade, it featured street preacher Ryan Williamson telling crowds that gay people were rapists and child molesters. After the incident was investigated by the PSNI as a possible hate crime, Williamson told BBC Ulster’s The Nolan Show that his comments were ‘taken out of context’. ‘Of course I don’t believe that homosexuals rape kids,’ he said. Although he withdrew the remarks in question, he added that the media coverage had been ‘diabolical’, and clarified his beliefs again live on air:
‘Homosexuality is a sin and there is a militant agenda that wants to rape the minds of our kids, their gender, identity and our country of its Biblical morality,’ he said. ‘I have many homosexual friends. I love people, but I love God more. I am free to preach God’s will in a democracy that was founded on the Bible – it’s ludicrous to say I can’t go out into the city centre and preach God’s word.’
Ryan Williamson is a member of Salvation on the Streets, a group of street ministers making fantastical claims about the power of the Lord – in one video on their Facebook page, a woman claims God cured her cancer. Some of their preachers wear red MAGA hats as they practise the laying of hands on passers-by. Although it was his head that rose above the parapet, Williamson is not an anomaly. He is merely one of a growing cast of eccentric fundamentalist preachers who have cemented themselves as macabre attractions in a city rapidly modernising itself for the tourist class. Belfast’s street preachers are an anachronistic curiosity – a callback to a time when the north was known for religious zealots and religious violence, not the Titanic Museum and the cobbled streets of the Cathedral Quarter. It would suit everyone if they disappeared and let the rest of the place get on with the business of making money and making things modern. They intend to do no such thing.
Although Belfast City Council last year opened a consultation on street preachers using amplifiers in Belfast city centre, which many employ to cast booming Biblical warnings across public spaces (the council sought to ‘strike the balance’ between ‘freedom of expression’ and noise pollution), last April it was reported that no further progress had been made. At the time, the street preachers themselves were typically flamboyant in response to the threat of regulation. ‘If they throw me in jail, I’ll go for the Lord,’ one told the Belfast Telegraph at the time.
Such is the case with local police too. The PSNI’s official advice on street preaching is tentative, and begins with a defence of freedom of speech and expression. ‘Freedom of thought, conscience and religion and freedom of expression are fundamental human rights enshrined in law. The right to preach and proselytise in public is not an absolute right and can be limited by, for example, the need to uphold the rights of others, protect public health and safety and by the need to prevent and detect crime. There is also a need to minimise disruption to normal life. The freedom to express, debate, challenge and even ridicule opposing viewpoints is crucial to any democratic society, and just because a remark is perceived as offensive or insulting by someone else does not mean that it constitutes “hate speech”.’ They go on to give advice to preachers on what they can and cannot sermonise without risk of arrest.
Of all the street preachers plaguing the city, though, none are as famous as Sister Anna. Dressed in a white habit which she sometimes accessorises with slogan hoodies bearing the words ‘No Surrender’ or old-school tabards emblazoned with ‘JESUS SAVES FROM HELL’, Anna is frequently seen on the streets of Belfast, stopping traffic or wailing wildly on street corners, speaking in tongues, generally causing a nuisance and inevitably going viral on TikTok. On 12 July she switched out her aesthetically Catholic costume for an orange alternative, draping herself in Union Jack flags.
The 45-year-old’s actual religious bonafides are dubious. A Sunday World article published last year claims the nun is actually a secret pole dancer and actress who is skilled in martial arts, and whose real name is Rachel Mulcahy. Anna (or Rachel) told the same paper that she was no longer a Catholic nun, but instead identified as a ‘Pentecostal evangelist’ and ‘Protestant unionist’. But whatever Anna, or Rachel’s, real-life origins, her online fame obscures her. She even has her own Tattle Life board – the true marker of internet infamy – which reports sightings of her stunts in London and Dublin.
Where there is confusion about Anna’s origins, what’s obvious is her mental distress. Her words are inarguably poisonous – in a court appearance last summer, charged with obstructing traffic while espousing racist conspiracy theories about asylum seekers, she said her actions were a protest against ‘Muslim violence’ – but also the actions of someone who is patently out of touch with reality. In court she says she is represented by ‘the Holy Spirit’ and refers to herself as HH (Her Holiness) Reverend Anna Christian. After climbing to the top of a loyalist bonfire pyre shouting obscenities about the Pope, she was briefly held in Hydebank Women’s Prison where she demanded £100 million in compensation over being left without adequate hygiene products. Before that she was banned from attending services at a Belfast monastery.
Nobody really knows where Anna came from before she arrived in Belfast (she is supposedly from County Down and lived in Dublin for some years), nor anything about her family or support system. She frequently disappears after a spell of manic stunts, with the internet left to speculate what’s become of her (recent sightings are thin on the ground, and online speculation suggests she may have moved to Bradford, where hopefully she will ‘get the help she needs’). Her Instagram page has been inactive since September, and in her last post she claimed to have been kidnapped by Manchester Police. But nobody knows for certain where Anna goes during these periods. She clearly does not belong to any Catholic order, and her erratic appearances put both herself and her neighbours in danger – a Redditor speculated on whether they should call 101 after seeing her house get attacked; the top comment dismissed her concerns, saying Anna was nothing more than an evangelical rage-baiter who was getting what she deserved.
Perhaps they are right. In particular her attacks on Belfast’s Muslim community are more than simply a joke for TikTok – mosques in Belfast have been burned to the ground more than once in recent years, and far-right pockets of violence frequently erupt at the expense of asylum seekers.
Extreme fundamentalist views, and the graphic imagery that comes with it, has long been a problem in Belfast’s public spaces. Even during the Troubles, preachers littered the bombed-out high streets, wearing placards that warned of the end of days, making Ian Paisley’s Free Presbyterian Church look moderate by comparison.
In the noughties, as a pre-teen, I remember the pro-life campaigners who set up shop outside our flagship Starbucks where teenagers would inevitably congregate, their tables laden with meticulously crafted, supposedly anatomically accurate aborted feotuses, and blown-up posters showing operating tables covered in blood. In Belfast, this sort of thing was passively accepted. Our collective attitude seemed to say: this is an odd city, full of people who are odd about religion; let people say and do hateful things – it could be worse. People being upset is better than people being blown up, right?
An acceptance of a certain level of absurdity has persisted as Belfast moved towards its peak street preacher era. In 2022, a viral video showed one street preacher in a showdown with ‘Jelvis’, a famous busker in the city centre who dresses in full Elvis regalia. The video shows Jelvis gyrating in his white jumpsuit, hyping up the crowd gathered with their iPhones, to try to drown out the gospel being sermonised via loudspeaker behind him.
It’s difficult to get any official advice on Anna. Because it’s an individual case, mental health charities refuse to comment, citing it as a private issue. Is it? Or is that overridden by the public nature of her particular brand of religious psychosis? For now, nobody is sure where she is, where she will pop up next or if she will return to her erratic nun cosplay on the streets of Belfast. The police, the council and most of the city would probably be happy if they never saw her again. But that wouldn’t eliminate the possibility that she – or maybe someone even more bizarre – would return one day. If you don’t get rid of all the Annas, there will always be more Annas to come.
