Brendan Behan was born in Dublin in February 1923 while his father was serving a term of imprisonment in Kilmainham gaol for IRA activities. His son would surpass his father in fanaticism. It was hardly surprising that he had been radicalised, as many of his family were die-hard Republicans. His mother, in particular, was an inveterate hater of the English and of England. So too was his grandmother. Indeed in 1939 she and his two aunts journeyed to England with the specific intention of carrying out terrorist attacks. A detonation in the house they were renting in Birmingham led the police to their door and to them being imprisoned for conspiring to cause explosions.

The young Brendan, who at the age of sixteen was already a fully-fledged member of the Second Dublin Battalion of the Irish Republican Army, decided to follow their example and go to England to take part in a bombing campaign instigated by the IRA, which had ‘declared war’ on Britain at the moment the British were fighting for survival against the horrors of Nazi Germany. He had tried twice before to sail to Liverpool but had been deterred by the police presence at the Dublin docks. Third time lucky? In November 1939 he succeeded in making the crossing. The police were already on his tail, and within ten hours of landing on English soil the aspiring would-be murderer was arrested with a suitcase full of gelignite and remanded in custody. Fortunately, following in the family tradition, he was useless at his vocation. His saving grace was front, or so he would have us believe. According to his account (in a letter to a friend) he told the police he was forty-nine years old, his name was Lord Rosebery, he worked as private secretary to the Aga Khan, and had been thrice arrested for bigamy.1 He was better at the blarney than at bombing.