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60 free Northern Ireland trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Northern Ireland trivia quiz covers the six counties from geology to golf. The easy questions are the ones any visitor should manage: the capital, the shipyard that built the Titanic, the basalt columns on the Antrim coast, the largest lake in the British Isles and the year the country was created. From there it moves into the deeper story, from the Plantation of Ulster and the Siege of Derry to partition, the unionist decades and the Troubles. The harder end is for history buffs and pub-quiz specialists: the Long Committee's six-county plan, Churchill's secret 1940 offer of Irish unity, the 1973 border poll, Bloody Sunday, the Peace People's Nobel Prize, the exact date of the Good Friday Agreement, the first nationalist First Minister, the walls that were never breached, Bushmills' misleading label date, the height of Titanic Belfast and the golfers who won three majors in fourteen months. Language, flags, anthems and murals get their own questions too. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for Northern Ireland, its cities and its history before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Ireland, United Kingdom and Belfast quizzes next.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the capital city of Northern Ireland?
Belfast
It stands on the River Lagan and is the second-largest city on the island of Ireland after Dublin.
Q 02How many historic counties make up Northern Ireland?
Six
Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry and Tyrone; the other three Ulster counties are in the Republic.
Q 03In which year was Northern Ireland created by the partition of Ireland?
1921
The Government of Ireland Act 1920 came into force on 3 May that year.
Q 04What was Northern Ireland's population at the 2021 census?
1.9 million
That is about 3% of the UK's population and 27% of the island of Ireland's.
Q 05The Giant's Causeway consists of roughly how many interlocking basalt columns?
40,000
They formed from an ancient volcanic fissure eruption during the Paleogene period.
Q 06In which year was the Giant's Causeway declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site?
1986
It lies in County Antrim about three miles from the town of Bushmills.
Q 07Which lake, the largest in the British Isles, sits at the centre of Northern Ireland?
Lough Neagh
It supplies about 40% of Northern Ireland's drinking water and its bed is owned by the Earl of Shaftesbury.
Q 08What is the highest mountain in Northern Ireland?
Slieve Donard
It rises 850 metres in the granite Mourne Mountains.
Q 09Which mountain range in Northern Ireland has extensive gold deposits?
The Sperrins
They are an extension of the Caledonian mountain belt.
Q 10As of 2020, about what percentage of Northern Ireland was woodland, among Europe's lowest?
8%
Most of it is non-native conifer plantation.
Q 11What is Northern Ireland's only native reptile?
The viviparous lizard
It is widely distributed in heaths, bogs and sand dunes.
Q 12What was the highest temperature ever recorded in Northern Ireland, at Armagh Observatory in July 2021?
31.4 C
Belfast's average daytime maximum is only 17.5 C in July.
Q 13The Harland & Wolff shipyard is famous for building which trio of White Star liners?
Olympic, Titanic and Britannic
A visitor centre opened in 2012 on the site where the ships were built.
Q 21Roughly how many Ulster Presbyterians emigrated to the American colonies between 1717 and 1775?
200,000
Their descendants are known as Scotch-Irish Americans.
Q 22The 1795 Battle of the Diamond led to the founding of which Protestant fraternity?
The Orange Order
It grew out of clashes between the Peep o' Day Boys and the Catholic Defenders in Armagh.
Q 23Which 1801 act merged the Kingdom of Ireland with Great Britain in response to the 1798 rebellion?
The Acts of Union
The United Irishmen who led the rising were a cross-community republican group founded by Belfast Presbyterians.
Q 14What are the two giant yellow Krupp cranes at the Harland & Wolff shipyard nicknamed?
Samson and Goliath
They serviced a graving dock built for post-war ships of up to 333,000 tonnes.
Q 15The 2012 Titanic Quarter visitor centre is exactly as tall as which feature of the ship?
Its hull
It stands 126 feet (38 m) high on the former Harland & Wolff site.
Q 16When Belfast gained city status in 1888, it was the world's biggest centre for manufacturing what?
Linen
By the 1900s its shipyards were building up to a quarter of all UK tonnage.
Q 17What is Northern Ireland's second-largest city?
Derry
Its old walled city sits on the west bank of the River Foyle.
Q 18Why is Derry nicknamed the Maiden City?
Its walls were never breached
It survived three 17th-century sieges, most famously the Siege of Derry of 1688-89.
Q 19Which holy man from Donegal is traditionally regarded as the founder of Derry?
Colmcille
He came from Tir Chonaill, the old name for most of modern County Donegal.
Q 20What 1607 event saw Ulster's Gaelic nobles flee to Europe, opening the way for the Plantation of Ulster?
The Flight of the Earls
Their lands were confiscated and settled by English-speaking Protestants from Britain.
Q 24Why did most unionists want the new Northern Ireland reduced from nine counties to six?
To secure a larger Protestant majority
The Long Committee had originally planned a government for all nine Ulster counties.
Q 25Roughly what were the religious proportions of Northern Ireland's population when it was created?
Two-thirds Protestant, one-third Catholic
The border was drawn deliberately to give a decisive Protestant majority.
Q 26How many people were killed in the Troubles in Ulster of 1920-22 that accompanied partition?
More than 500
More than 10,000 people, mostly Catholics, became refugees.
Q 27Which political grouping governed Northern Ireland without interruption for its first fifty years?
The Ulster Unionists
Every prime minister of those governments was a member of the Orange Order.
Q 28Which British PM secretly offered in June 1940 to encourage Irish unity if Ireland joined the Allies?
Winston Churchill
De Valera declined, and his rejection was not made public until 1970.
Q 29Which two leaders held the first meeting between Northern Ireland's and the Republic's heads of government, in 1965?
Terence O'Neill and Sean Lemass
The IRA's Border Campaign of 1956-62 had failed shortly before.
Q 30How many people were killed during the roughly thirty years of the Troubles?
About 3,250
There were over 36,900 shooting incidents and 16,200 bombings between 1969 and 2003.