Brendan Behan

Brendan Behan was an Irish author and playwright, who was born in February 1923. After leaving school in 1837 he trained in the house painting trade. He was arrested in 1940 in London and sentenced to three years in a reform school at Hollesley Bay. This lead to the autobiographical account published in 1958 under the title “Borstal Boy”. He later was in trouble when he sentenced to 14 years for attempted murder. He was sentenced to 14 years for this event and served the sentence at Mountjoy Prison and at the Curragh Military Camp in Co Kildare. He was released in 1946. In 1946 he left Ireland for Paris for the purpose of writing and returned to Dublin in 1950. When back in Dublin he wrote short stories and scripts for RTE. In 1953 he started to write a column for the newspaper the Irish Press. In 1955 he married Beatrice nee Salkeld and died in Dublin in March 1964.
In 1959 Brendan Behan was persuaded by his wife Beatrice to take a room at the La Touche Hotel in Greystones. He arrived there on the 3rd of March and later that evening was found on Church Road not in the best of form. A doctor examined him and Behan was arrested and taken to Greystones police station and charged with drunk and disorderly behaviour. He was later fined forty shillings at Bray District Court by District Judge Manus Noonan for being drunk and disorderly at 1am in Greystones, Co Wicklow.

His works included plays such as The Quire Fellow (1954) and The Hostage (1958). Other works included the Bostral Boy (1958) and the novel The Scarperer (1964).