Poet, writer, dramatist and Irish Republican, Brendan Behan’s relatively short life, ended 60 years ago, on 20 March 1964. Behan came from a staunchly Republican family. One of his uncles wrote The Soldier’s Song, which became the Irish national anthem and his brother Dominic was also a Republican activist.
Brendan Behan joined the IRA’ s youth organisation at the age of fourteen. He was caught in possession of explosives and sentenced to three years in a Borstal, in Hallesley Bay, Suffolk.
Behan was lucky, Hallesley Bay was run by a liberal minded reformer and Behan says he was happy there. He wrote up his experiences in his best known work, Borstal Boy. Published in 1958, it was banned in Ireland (and, for some reason, in Australia!).
He was arrested again in 1942, this time by the Irish authorities, and found guilty of conspiracy to murder and attempted murder. He received a 14 year sentence.
In 1954 he wrote a stage play, The Quare Fellow, based partly on his experience in the notorious Mountjoy Prison in Dublin. The well-known song The Old Triangle emanates from this period (and apparently is still sung by inmates to this day). He was released under a general amnesty in 1946.
The Hostage followed in 1958. In that play, a young British soldier is held captive by the IRA while in Belfast an IRA volunteer is due to be executed by the British. With the co-operation of Joan Littlewood at the Theatre Royal in London, Behan’s reputation spread and he became popular in Britain and the USA. His was an important voice in Irish culture, an alternative to the dominance of the W. B. Yeats legacy.
There was a downside however, Behan was a notorious boozer, epitomised by his being blind drunk in a BBC broadcast interview with the rather stodgy Malcom Muggeridge. As his dependence on alcohol increased there was a corresponding downward spiral in his output and, in all fairness, it is probably true to say that, in later life, his talent only blossomed sporadically.