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Brendan Francis Behan, was a progeny of  working-class Dublin. When he came screaming into the world  in February 1923, he was welcomed by Stephen and Kathleen, intellectually accomplished parents who were also fond of  singing. The ‘Da’ as Stephen was dubbed, had studied to be a Jesuit priest and qualified as a teacher.  But, after being caught in a ‘compromising position’ with a young woman, he got shown the door.
In the War of Independence he was an associate of  rebel leader Michael Collins and a member of an assassination squad.  Teaching, a possible post-war option, was denied to him, as he refused to take the oath of allegiance to the British Crown, required of government employees in the new Free State. So, he became a  housepainter.  Kathleen, had been a Republican messenger during the Easter Rising.  In the ensuing years she  took great pleasure in the shaping of her childrens’ enquiring minds while taking them on literary tours around their home city.  Family life therefore was seasoned with song and with classic literature, often read aloud to their assembled gossoons.   
Brendan joined Fianna Éireann, the youth wing of the IRA, at the age of fourteen.  By the age of sixteen he had been admitted to the IRA. Granny English, his paternal grandmother, who spoiled him, had taught him to drink early on. At the age of eleven he was expelled  from the Fianna for drunkeness.  He was reinstated  because he kept turning up for parades and refused to recognise his expulsion. When he joined the IRA he curtailed his alcohol consumption to get through military training.
His first efforts as a freedom-fighter, were marked by the chaos that was to be the motif of his later life.   Sent to London with a package, he was instructed to deliver it to a man at an underground station. Behan would be able to identify the recipient he was told,  as he would be carrying a copy of the Picture Post magazine. At the rendezvous he couldn’t spot any such male figure but saw a woman reading the said publication.  His attempts to deliver the package to her caused her to fear a sexual assault, and she screamed for the police. Apprehension was avoided by the contact arriving on the scene and extracting him from the situation.  Despite that incident he became a  revolutionary contender, but possibly the most individual and most often thwarted.  
Trained as a bomb-maker, he set out for Liverpool, with the intention of creating unauthorised explosive mayhem at the city’s docks. This time he got arrested before he did any damage and spent his first imprisonment consigned to a youth facility.  After doing his time, an expulsion from England was imposed. Two more prison terms in Ireland followes, one for attempted murder of a gardai, before he gave up his guerrilla career in 1947.  Regardless, he continued to give money to the movement and remained on the IRA’s rolls.
These detentions in an English borstal, Mountjoy Jail and the Curragh provided  the foundation of  his later fame and the recognition of his genius.   A Mountjoy cell was his writer’s study where he crafted his first play ‘The Landlady’. His hugely successful drama ‘The Quare Fellow’ (1954) owes its origin to his prison experiences. Incarceration in England led to the novel ‘Borstal Boy’(1958).  In the Curragh he had acquired fluency in Irish. This proficiency was the underpinning of his play ‘The Hostage’, first produced as Gaelige in 1957, and entitled ‘An Giall’.  During the following year it was produced  in its English translation, by a pioneering dramatist, his theatrical mentor Joan Littlewood.
Bryan McMahon, author and Kerry native first met Behan at the office of ‘The Bell’ literary magazine in 1945.  On that first meeting, Brendan told the Listowel man hilarious tales of his jailing in England. He finished off  the stories, confessing that a spell of solitary confinement had disturbed him greatly, saying tellingly,
‘The solitary confinement near drove me crazy. I was never meant to be alone.’
In subsequent years he was seldom on his own. People clamoured for his company and celebrity. They hung on to his every witticism and aphorism. Drunken television interviews were applauded. Outrageous public showmanship brought headlines, at least for a while.
However, his niece Janet Behan, speaking to the Daily Mail in 2008 commented,
‘He dreaded loneliness. At the heart of it, he couldn’t bear to be alone.’
With marriage to Beatrice Salkeld in 1955, rescue and internal ease seemed within his grasp, but his grip on it didn’t endure.
Over time his creative ability began to deteriorate. Tales of serial infidelity with both men and women, love children and reports of darker misdeeds circulated.  By then, the intimate of the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and Norman Mailer was being spurned in places that had previously thrown open their doors to him. His last books, ‘Brendan Behan’s Island: An Irish Sketchbook’ ,’Brendan Behan’s New York’  and ‘Confessions of  an Irish Rebel’ were exercises in dictation and editing rather than the  achievements of  authorship.
Dublin’s’ broth of a boy’ died on the 20th March 1964, four months after Beatrice had given birth to their daughter Blanaid.   Officially diabetes and a fatty liver were blamed. Unofficially some observers felt that celebrity and alcohol might have been a more accurate diagnosis. At the end he wasn’t alone.  Thousands of people lined the streets for his last journey and he was accorded an IRA funeral. Sadly, the parade of his inspired creations had long passed and now he has gone.
As one of his friends said at the graveside, we’ll never see his likes again