Brunswick House - The Hostel From Hell in Central Belfast

The thinking and principles behind Belfast's first 'Wet Hostel' in Brunswick House were mighty fine and admirable. No-one should be deprived of shelter and a bite of food because of their lifestyle; food and shelter being a right not a privilege. Furthermore many of the target group, Belfast's rough sleepers would have little choice in their 'lifestyle' - the majority being chronic alcoholics and/or drug addicts who suffer from a usually fatal disease. Similar projects had been created over in Britain and in Dublin, some survive to this day and are well managed apparently. The project was initiated by the Lee Hestia Housing Association which later became part of the Novas Group, darlings of the Blairite policy of privatising social services.

Ideally, Brunswick House would have been a haven for Belfast's rough sleepers where they could have accessed health care, had at least one hot meal per day, get their entitlement to benefits sorted out, secured a place on the social housing list and through care been offered an alternate lifestyle or at least shown that recovery from addiction was an option. There was also to be individual accomodation not a dormitory atmosphere where residents would feel safe from the violence that was commonplace among rough sleepers. A 'wet room' ie a designated drinking zone was to be offered to the residents while drinking in other zones was to be discouraged. According to the mission statement there would be an atmosphere of 'high tolerance' which unfortunately management used as a stick to beat staff with, as the full reality of the 'Brunswick House Experience' later unravelled! Residents would sign a tenancy agreement on admission that would supposedly guarantee their behaviour within certain parameters, well that was the theory but the reality was somewhat different.

The site where Belfast's first wet hostel was situated was the old former Queens University halls of residence in Brunswick street, a 6 story building a kick in the arse away from the city's prestigious Europa Hotel. Prior to the building being a students' halls of residence, Brunswick House had been the old War Memorial hostel which was originally opened for veterans of WW2. To be fair to the management the building was old, crumbling in some places with only a few floors inhabitable due to a horrendous pigeon infestation in the upper floors. The frontline staff recruited initially were well motivated and were led to believe that they could make a 'difference' and provide a professional duty of care. Many of the staff recruited were graduates from various professions or had many years experience in the various 'caring professions.' Many staff were to act as key workers for the residents and advocate on their behalf on various 'issues' that were an integral part of their lives. Support workers were assured that their roles would be challenging but that they themselves would be fully supported by their line management.

Prior to the Brunswick House 'wet hostel' experience homeless people living in the majority of hostels in Belfast could be refused entry to their accomodation if they arrived back even smelling of alcohol. Those found in possession of alcohol were often immediately evicted from hostel accomodation and forced to walk the streets until they could find another hostel on the homeless 'circuit' willing to take them in, which was no easy feat as prospective hostel clients were interviewed about their previous accomodation and potential intaking hostels were reluctant to take in those previously evicted from other hostel accomodation. In some cases homeless people could find themselves effectively 'blacklisted' from the whole hostel network. Many homeless people had not had access to primary medical care for decades, some had not received their proper benefit entitlement for many years. There was definitely an identifiable 'need' out there and the local body responsible for providing accomodation for the homeless, the Housing Executive had agreed to fund the Brunswick House 'experiment' for a few trial years. As stated above the principles behind Belfast's first 'wet' hostel were mighty fine, even partly egalitarian but the reality differed greatly in practice.

A Vision of Hell !

Within a few months of Belfast's first wet hostel opening, despite the best efforts of the frontline staff Brunswick House had become a vision of Hell on earth for hostel workers, the neighbours and the residents themselves! Inexperienced incompetant management and middle-mangement were the real authors of the abomination that Brunswick degenerated into, I could list reams of disturbing facts and incidents that staff and residents experienced in what became Belfast's most notorious hostel. The only light relief came from the daily complaints from the local high-brow businesses that surrounded the hostel as the local hotels and restaurants were scandalised by reports of their well heeled customers being pawed by leering tramps! When the support staff's office was 'open plan', workers regularly had to dodge empty drink bottles, fire extinguishers and even smaller residents being hurled at them - small wonder it was known as 'Fort Apache the Bronx' to the workforce. Local mental health wards used the place as a dumping ground for their more difficult patients and the North of Ireland's probation service often metaphorically flushed their toilet on the place, often filling the hostel with the dregs of the local gaols' petty criminal & sex offender fraternity! The original target client-group, Belfast's longterm roughsleepers were quickly overwhelmed within the hostel by the younger, quicker, criminal elements who remorselessly preyed upon them and made their lives possibly more miserable than when they were living rough on the streets. Many of the older roughsleepers ultimately preferred a doorway as a home to the horrors of Brunswick House where although they risked freezing to death in winter, they felt much safer and less likely to meet a violent end. Renowned Belfast tramp, the late great Gerry Glennon (RIP) voted with his feet and like a drunken bearded Moses led many of his fellow rough sleepers out of Brunswick House to the relative safety of the cold & rain! Gerry and his fellow travellers were a joy to work with and no real problem to deal with. It was a pity that the hostel which was initially intended for just that client group became a dangerous place for rough sleepers foolhardy enough to remain resident in Brunswick House. (Gerry was a familiar face round Belfast city centre til his passing a couple of years ago, he was only in his early 40's)

Nothing could prepare the anthropologically strange for what met them on spending even an insignificant period of time in Brunswick House! It also had the unenviable status of being the address with the most police incidents in the whole of the North of Ireland and it also held the record for hosting by far the most '999' calls from one building ever since statistics were collated! Any crime in a quarter mile radius could usually be traced back to the hostel in some way or other and even if the residents were not actually responsible, they got the blame anyway! There was nothing particularly strange in staff coming in to work only to discover during handover that the police had been to the building perhaps 5 times during the earlier shift. Residents were regularly getting hauled out to waiting police vans for their latest act of thuggery on the unsuspecting passing public. Ambulances (and even the firebrigade!) were regular callers at Brunswick House, sometimes coming several times in the one shift for the same resident, who more often than not took some persuading to get serious injuries tended to. The Mortuary Van was no stranger to the place either, though the residents they came for rarely raised a fuss. The journey through the claustrophobic gloomy warren of small corridors that contained the cell-like residents' rooms was not for the faint hearted, nor the weak stomached - many of the door handles were often 'booby-trapped' with human excrement for unsuspecting workers! Incidents like that added weight to the staffs' belief that it was indeed a shitty workplace!

A culture of extreme social Darwinism prevailed throughout the hostel and with staffing levels dipping to a ratio of 2 members per 45-50 residents, there was little the workers could do to protect the weaker more vulnerable residents from the younger more aggressive predatory tenants. On an inspection of one of the communal rooms, a 55 year old resident was found kicked unconscious and robbed behind a sofa which the younger residents who had attacked him were still sitting on, he had lain there for over 5 hours! This particular older resident was eventually beaten to death outside one of Brunswick's satellite hostels. Residents reporting serious assaults and rapes to management got short shrift and any incident reports that frontline workers made were quickly shredded when they got to the management offices. Bullying and extortion of the more timid residents was rife and those unable to fight for themselves often lost every penny of their benefits within an hour of getting them. Residents who eventually got re-housed in permanent accomodation were held up as the 'Brunswick House Success Stories!' These 'success stories' were usually found dead within a few weeks either through alcohol poisoning caused by a community care grant funded binge of continuous house warming parties or were dispatched violently by their old hostel guests who had come to visit them!

Staff themselves were the victims of serious assaults by violent residents and at least one female support worker was sexually assaulted on shift. Despite the totally unmanageable levels of violence against frontline staff, management and the senior-support worker totally blanked their staffs' concerns and hid behind the hostel's 'high-tolerance' mantra. The management and senior support worker were entirely underqualified for the responsibilities of the job eg, despite being paid an on-call allowance, the mincing half-wit of a senior support worker never was seen in the building after 5pm preferring to pay part time casual staff to cover for him. In contrast if any resident went in to arrears on their service charge which was collected in cash each week by the hostel out of the residents own personal money, they could find themselves out on their ear ! Debt to the proprieters of the hostel was viewed far more seriously than grevious bodily harm to staff members because as far as management were concerned workers were cheap (!) and the local housing authorities paid staffing costs anyway!

Within the period that Brunswick stayed open, scores of residents literally drank themselves to death. Several were murdered just off hostel premises, others took their lives in their miserable rooms and the media combined with local hoteliers, business people & ex-staff / residents called publicly for the place to be shut down. Management thought they could weather the storm as they were raking it in from Housing executive benefit's payments with each bed being filled bringing in several hundred pounds per resident per week.

Eventually the levels of violence against staff, residents and passers-by reached ferocious, media attention levels. Several residents were murdered just outside the precincts of the hostel, cases of attempted murder, grevious bodily harm in inter-resident disputes were getting to be a daily occurance. Several ex-staff members were sueing the hostel owners for physical and emotional trauma. Street robberies and sexual assaults on passersby increased. Then finally, the inevitable happened - during one of the daily predatory resident-on-resident 'violence sessions', this time some of the tenants actually managed to brutally murder a fellow hostel dweller ON the premises! The body of the murder victim was discovered by the 'observant' senior staff member a good few hours after the unfortunate fellow had had been murdered in a frenzied stabbing (with knives taken from the kitchens weilded by some of the other residents!) It would appear that shortly after the gruesome discovery the Senior support Worker eventually figured out the deceased wasnt really pretending to be asleep, consulted the company procedures manual then finally raised the alarm! The mortuary van was an all too familiar sight to staff as it trundled up to the hostel but this time there was clear evidence of 'malice aforethought' in the dispatching of the passenger it had come to collect this time! There was nothing novel in the building being declared a serious crime scene but in this case the police tape sealed the building for the last time...

The publicity surrounding the horrific hostel murder was the 'straw that broke the camels back' and quite swiftly after that the Brunswick 'experiment' was packed away, surviving residents being dispersed throughout the other local hostels. The neighbours surrounding it breathed a collective sigh of relief and the traumatised frontline staff now had unemployment to contend with as well as PTSD and were the real all-round losers in the whole sorry saga.

The local newspaper the Belfast Telegraph had this to say about Brunswick House's eventual closure:

Horror storey's

By Joe Oliver
Wednesday, 6 December 2006

A top level report into the notorious Lee Hestia hostel in Belfast concluded that it was failing to meet even "minimum requirements" of service.
It also found that, because of inadequate training, staff were unable to identify incidents of abuse, while some rooms in the seven-storey building represented a health and safety risk to occupants.
The damning report - obtained by Sunday Life under a Freedom of Information application - made a series of sweeping recommendations.
The report into the 'wet' Brunswick Street-based facility was part of a wide-ranging review carried out by the Housing Executive, which provided funding for male and female residents.
It was completed in October 2004 and followed the savage, booze-fuelled killing of former Royal Irish Ranger Eric Atkinson in the hostel seven months earlier.
And the scathing report comes in the wake of recent claims of sexual and physical abuse by two former residents of Lee Hestia.
Read more: http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/incoming/horror-storeys-13570928.html#ixzz0Wlx0Vn12

Indeed.

Just a pity these findings came too little too late. The was no political or sectarian motive for the murder of the unfortunate resident, it was just the result of the usual Brunswick House daily ritual of casual violence except that the more predatory minded residents slipped up so to speak and managed to actually murder someone 'in-house' on this occasion.

(This article is taken from an as yet unpublished manuscript containing a personal account of more of my own Brunswick House experiences.)

© Iskra 13/11/2009