A new play tells the too-common story of a homeless mother separated from her children

In a conference room upstairs at the Axis theatre in Ballymun, playwright and actor Helen McGrath is trying to get a scene just right.

She becomes Ivy, a mother separated from her children by the housing crisis, and as she does, she acts out a physical struggle with her right hand.

She grabs her right hand with her left, straining to try and tame it but instead ends up pinned against the wall.

“She is under attack, she is battling against this other force – which we have decided is this hand here,” says McGrath.

“But it’s symbolic of all the things that are outside of her control, within the system, things that happened in her home with her husband,” she says.

Movement director Ois O’Donoghue demonstrates the moves for McGrath, which she acts out as “Sabotage” by the Beastie Boys plays in the background.

Ivy is trying to fight back. Yet at the end of the scene, she ends up curled up in the foetal position. “There is a resignation,” says McGrath.

The play, named after its only character, is set in Ivy’s cramped bedroom in a shared house where she is living away from her kids after a long struggle to leave a controlling relationship.

That is one way it can happen, says McGrath, who has researched the issue and found that women disproportionately end up among the hidden homeless and living separately from their children.

“I placed myself in that situation, I imagined, what would it be like to sit in a box room of an overcrowded house-share?” she says. “It emanated from there. It was that initial emotion or feeling.”

A searing script

While working in a constituency office in Cabra and later in a homeless charity, McGrath talked to many women who were among the hidden homeless.

Many were young mothers, she said, and she noticed a common story that wasn’t often discussed. They were often living apart from their children.

Some of those mothers are like Ivy, fleeing domestic violence or coercive control. But others prefer to leave their children with a relative, to avoid bringing the kids to a hostel.

“They want their children to be in a more familiar place,” she says. “They want to make it more homely.”

Discussions of homelessness that collapse into numbers can dehumanise, says McGrath. “What I’ve given to Ivy is her internal world, this is very much intact.”

“I wanted to show that Ivy may be in this situation, but through flashes and fragments we build a story of her life,” she says.

A childhood home, her relationships with her own children, there are layers to her experience that connect the audience to her personally, says McGrath.

“The path home, the way home is however, always present and the absence of their presence is a burden, a guilt, I cannot shed,” says Ivy.

The play explores the complex emotions experienced with the loss of a home, using music and movement. “The soundscape is reflective of the turmoil Ivy is going through,” says McGrath.

There is a critique too of the homeless “industry”. When she goes to try to get accommodation for herself and her children, she finds she is a “customer”.

She shrinks when she gets to the counter. “To further add to your discomfort we have ensured that you feel as small as can possibly be.”

There are funny moments too. McGrath skilfully excoriates the experiences of mature adults sharing a house with a race for a clothes horse.

“And they’re off. It’s Una’s Lot on the right hand side, Ivy’s Choice on the left. And they’re both in solid form as they approach the first hurdle.”

Women’s hidden homelessness

McGrath says that through her work, she kept meeting young mothers, desperate for accommodation but also trying to avoid homeless services.

Women see emergency accommodation as a last resort, she says. “The research corroborated what I was hearing anecdotally.”

Research published last year by Simon Community found that around 32,500 households in Ireland are hidden homeless.

“Measurement techniques obscure the extent of women’s homelessness,” said Paula Mayock, associate professor at the School of Social Work and Social Policy in Trinity College Dublin, in a talk early last year.

Stigma around women who are without a home means they are often more reluctant to go into homeless accommodation, she says, and so they are pushed into hidden forms of homelessness.

Like staying with relatives or friends in overcrowded situations, sofa surfing, and staying in other temporary accommodation which isn’t suitable long term, like caravans, tourist hostels, or cars.

Academic literature from the past holds negative depictions and stereotypes, she says. Casting homeless women as the “eccentric, bag lady”, she says.

The number of women presenting as homeless without children in their care is growing disproportionately in Ireland, compared to other European countries, says Mayock in the talk.

But she says many of these women do have children. “Many of these women are mothers who are separated from their children,” she says. “And very often these women are sidelined or not recognised as mothers.”

In McGrath’s play, Ivy tries to declare herself homeless and to secure accommodation where she can bring her children.

“There’s been a mistake, this isn’t right, there’s a little girl and boy, my little girl and boy, at home, at the house, my house,” she says.

Directed by Esosa Ighodaro, Ivy opens in the New Theatre on 25 March.