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BRENDAN BEHAN, SHAW and my FATHER

On the 50th anniversary of the death of Brendan Behan It is too late to talk to him about his writing. He is dead. But he was alive when I first overheard my parents discussing him.

My father, Deasún, and Brendan, were fellow writers in among other publications, The Bell, perhaps the most important Irish literary and intellectual journal in the twentieth century. Both writers shared radical political and literary thoughts, always conversing in Irish, which they had both learnt recently, post school.