2024 is shaping up to be a big year for West Belfast writer Fionnuala Kennedy.

In August the Lenadoon playwright’s Project Children premiered at Féile an Phobail, staged in the new St Comgall’s complex on Divis Street. In the spring it will open in The Lyric Theatre in Stranmillis, and if all goes to plan it will be heading to the States in October.

The play tells the incredible story of the ground-breaking cross-Atlantic initiative which for over four decades took 23,000 children away from the conflict in the North of Ireland to the US, where they were hosted by up to 1,500 American families.

But it has not been all plain-sailing for the former St Louise’s student who is now honing her skills as a full-time writer.

“I did really well in school and then went to BIFHE (now Belfast Met) to do the HND in Performing Arts and then at the end of that I became pregnant and all my friends were doing stuff and had left our course and gone on to university and I was really stuck,” she said.

“Then I had my daughter and I started trying to get back in and I auditioned for the Lyric Theatre Drama Studio which is a kind of actor development programme. Back then it was open to everybody from 18 years on and I was about 23-24 and I met a woman called Jo Egan who was the director at the time of the Lyric Drama Studio and she was working for a theatre company called Kabosh, so I started volunteering with Kabosh and Jo got me an administrator’s job with them. I felt I had my foot in the door then. I was like, I’m in the theatre, this is where it starts, and they had me doing invoices and printing off scripts and I just loved it.”

At the same time that Fionnuala was working with Kabosh she had been living in a hostel. It was her experience living in the hostel which first pushed her to put pen to paper.

“When I got out (of the hostel) I needed to tell that story but I was too embarrassed to tell anybody so I started writing it and then I had my friends at the time, Caroline Curran, Julie McCann – who unfortunately passed away in 2019 – and a girl called Monica McNally, and they rehearsed it for free and we put it on and that is how it started. We performed it at the Community Arts Forum at the time just off Writers’ Square.

Fionnuala Kennedy
3Gallery

Fionnuala Kennedy

“This was 2010 when we did the first performance of Hostel and it was in a wee room and we put out chairs. People who worked in housing told other people who worked in housing that they needed to see this play and it kept coming out over the years in different venues like the Opera House in 2018. When I first saw the reaction that’s when I said to myself, maybe I can write and that was the start of it.”
 
The idea for Project Children had been gnawing away at the back of Fionnuala’s brain for a number of years. After a discussion with her older sister – who had been hosted by a family in the United States when she was a child – she knew she had to turn her idea into a play.

“I realised that after all these years I hadn’t properly asked my sister what it was like to go to America at such a young age and when I spoke to her I emailed Tony Devlin at Brassneck and I told him we need to do this, somebody else is going to move on this. I always like the unknown stories and the personal stories so he put in for commissioning and we got that the following year and I started it at the end of that year.”

The next process was for Fionnuala to interview people who had been on the real Project Children when they were kids, as well as the adults who helped organise it from Belfast. 

“When you interview people who have had this same experience, even though their stories are different because they went to different parts of America, you felt there was a common thread. What was it like as a child leaving your family? What was the airport like? How did your family feel? How did you feel leaving? What was it like when you landed? And you were getting replies like, you want to see the size of the cars and the hamburgers – but you can’t do a play about the size of the hamburgers.

“But what became really clear to me was what the children were leaving behind. They were talking about someone who had been shot dead and I realised that we had all been desensitised by what had happened and we had normalised the war. People never think that their story is interesting, but I felt that what they were leaving was really interesting and what they were coming back to and how it had changed them. It really did make an impact on people and shaped their futures for good or for bad sometimes.” 

Monica Culbert and Sally Brennan’s characters are the narrators of the play. Monica and Sally were instrumental in getting the project off the ground on this side of the Atlantic and worked tirelessly with Denis Mulcahy from New York who founded the project back in 1975 after watching footage on TV of the horrors of the conflict on the streets of Belfast and Derry.

A scene from Project Children
3Gallery

A scene from Project Children

“We did a reading long before we did the rehearsals and we thought this was our final draft. We did a private reading for Monica and Sally and everybody I’d interviewed because it was all anonymous as well, so they all came in and everybody was really emotional, but Monica and Sally were really delighted and that’s part of it as well because then you know that they’re going to help you sell it and then Tony came in and made it a show. I was feeling, this doesn’t feel like it’s mine anymore, it’s something else now, it’s way bigger. Tony did an incredible job as did the rest of the team.”

Then opening night arrived at St Comgall’s during Féile an Phobail this year.

“We had no idea what was going to happen. We were all just sitting watching this first show – the audience were noisy because they were reacting, which is what you want. And then they stood at one point towards the end and they were clapping and Laura Hughes who plays Monica had to come out and say, ‘it’s not over yet’ and do the rest of the scene and then everybody stood again, and we could feel it that we had tapped into something.”

Fionnuala is now looking forward to a busy year with the play being staged at The Lyric in April, especially with the technical capabilities available at the theatre.

“But there was something about being in St Comgall’s and being the first play staged there that will stay with me,” she said. “I hope that we have that same energy in The Lyric Theatre, I’m sure we will. We had people who came to see it two and three times.”

The plan is to take Project Children to America in October – but it is funding dependent. 

“First of all we would really like to bring it out for Denis so that he can see it and we want to go to the families who hosted the children. My sister’s American family flew over for the play. A lot of the older people who hosted children back in the day have passed away. But their children were there and were part of it, and their own children know all about it – that’s who we want to bring it to.

“All being well we’re hoping to go to Upstate New York, New Jersey, Boston and Washington. It will be like giving something back.”