Not On Our Watch – standing up to a system that lets its citizens down (Kabosh)

Late last week, the NI Children’s Commissioner released the results of a formal investigation into the life of a child in the car of the state. As the effect of interventions and missed opportunities for intervention in the young woman’s life were uncovered, the report ends up tracking her life from birth until now in her early twenties. At every stage, the state had let her down. For much of the time, her ‘legal parent’ has been the Health and Social Care Trust. Today the state is still letting her down through an inability to provide care in Northern Ireland , leaving her in an English institution, deprived of her liberty and ready access to her family for the last six years. It’s a heartbreaking report, and in my opinion it has been largely underreported in the local media. The summary and full versions can be read online.

Louise Mathews’ new play Not On Our Watch brings to life another example of state inaction. In this case, what seems from the outside like a lack of proper governance and regulation of the organisation running a women’s hostel, Regina Coeli House in west Belfast, just behind the Felons Club on the other side of the road from the Kennedy Centre. It was the only dedicated women’s homeless hostel in Northern Ireland.

Some context for anyone who hasn’t been following the news. (I don’t think it counts as spoilers given the real-life circumstances being portrayed!)

Regina Coeli House became a charity in 2017. It leases its building from leases the building from the Legion of Mary. The latest accounts (year ending 31 March 2020) on the Charity Commission website explain that:

The purposes of the charity are to provide Belfast based temporary accommodation for homeless women from the ages of 18 up, by providing a safe and secure environment for the residents with appropriate levels of staff cover and pastoral care. The hostel provides accommodation for 21 women and accommodation includes 4 rooms with are disabled access. An emergency room is also available. As well as providing temporary accommodation, the Hostel provides advice and assistance to all residents by allocating each resident a keyworker who will help with primary health care, budgeting, debt management, mental health issues, substance misuse issues and future resettlement.

Under ‘achievements and performance’ the charity accounts say:

The Hostel has provided temporary accommodation to homeless women since 1938. The hostel is a refuge for homeless women, many of whom have a history of rough sleeping and alcohol or substance misuse and frequently present challenging behaviour. In the year to March 2020, Regina Coeli has provided support to 245 (2019: 235), homeless women. Each woman presented their own unique needs and risks, which are assessed during the application process and continuously assessed during the first week of their stay in Regina. These assessments provide the basis for individual support plans. The end goal being that the women are re-housed successfully with external floating support in place.

The play uses a multi-roled cast of three to portray three key members of staff (Aoife, Grace and Mary) as well as some of their colleagues and many residents. The fictional characters are based on a larger number of real staff and residents, The set is bare: three black chairs on an empty stage. There are no sound effects. This is stripped back theatre with a real bite. Yet director Paula McFetridge makes the cast and characters sing – literally and dramatically – as they bring the roller-coaster ride of a story to life.

The Legion of Mary is made up of lay Catholics. “Seeing and serving Christ in the sick and marginalised” is seen as one of the “vital” parts of the organisation’s mission.

The hostel’s management committee decided to close the facility, citing a building survey that suggested £500,000 of repairs were necessary. New managers had noticeably changed – and allegedly damaged – the spirit of the regime within the hostel. Covid restrictions had reduced the number of residents and staff, and the decline continued throughout 2021 with unsafe and inappropriate alternative accommodation offered to women in Regina Coeli House.

Six staff members in conjunction with the Unite union staged a ‘work-in’, continuing the support the handful of residents who remained while politicians and community members lobbied and negotiated with the Department for Communities, the NI Housing Executive, the Diocese of Down and Connor, the Legion of Mary and the hostel’s management committee.

Louise Mathews’s intelligent script uses humour, slang and passion to convey the daily work in the hostel and the build-up of anxiety and fear among the staff. Mary (Rachel McCabe) can’t help but connect what people are saying to pop lyrics, bursting into song at every possible moment. In happier times, her colleagues join in. When times are more tough, they channel their emotion through the titular anthem composed by Katie Richardson. Over ninety minutes, we see Grace (Catriona McFeely) grow in confidence while Aoife (Bernadette Brown) shows the struggle of juggling work and family.

The work-in ceased in March 2022 after 12 weeks. The Department for Communities committed to opening new enhanced women-only hostels within two months (May 2022) and the remaining residents offered their own turnkey accommodation across the city. The department’s promises were not fulfilled. It’s now January 2023 and just one hostel is operating, and only overnight (with no daytime provision). Only one of the residents felt able to stay alone in the provided housing: the move away from the hostel was too soon for them.

Not On Our Watch is an important piece of theatre that highlights how a society can so often overlook the support and fair treatment of women.

It records the stories of real people: residents and staff. It humanises a news story that was sometimes – though not always – reduced to a charity not being able to afford to continue, workers not accepting the financial situation, and a government department unable or unwilling to intervene. Yet this play produced by Kabosh adds colour and texture, highlighting parties which refused to engage, pointing to hypocrisy and vindictiveness, and shining a light on the human cost of residents being ‘resettled’ from the hostel before they were ready. While the production is supported by Unite, the union doesn’t come out of the script entirely unscathed. To realise that shipyard men ‘from the east’ showed active support for a west Belfast hostel is a joyful detail to include.

Kabosh productions “give voice to site, space and people”. There a vibrancy to Not On Our Watch that matches the animation of A Queer Céilí at the Marty Forsythe and on the whole it works much better than recent Callings that was somehow less theatrically fulfilling.

While the work and impact of Kabosh and its artistic director Paula McFetridge are well established, Louise Mathews has put herself on the map as a playwright in the mould of Fionnuala Kennedy and the late Jo Egan, able to create a dramatic narrative and engaging dialogue from real people’s recollections of extraordinary situations that deserve to be captured, both for posterity and to challenge systems and gatekeepers in the here and now.

When Not On Our Watch is next out on tour, book a seat. 

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