Brendan Behan was born February 9, 1923, in Dublin, Ireland, into a working-class Irish-Catholic family that had long been involved in the Republican movement. His father worked as a house painter, a trade in which his son also trained, and he was active within the Irish-Catholic community in Dublin as a labor leader and an Irish Republican Army (IRA) soldier. Behan's uncle Peader Kearney wrote the "Soldier's Song," which became the Irish national anthem, while his mother was also a passionate Republican.

Behan joined the Fianna, a Republican youth organization through which the IRA recruited members, and he became involved in the IRA when he was sixteen. In 1939 he was arrested in Liverpool for possession of explosives: he had planned to mount a single-man mission to blow up a British warship in the Liverpool docks. He was imprisoned for two years in a reformatory in Borstal, England, an...