Country Living with Francis Farragher

As a child, I remember once being told by my mother, that a certain gentleman farmer just over the road from us was now 40-years of age. To a child of about eight or nine summers, it seemed to be terribly old, as I thought to myself would I ever live to such a senior age.

In one of my local watering holes on the way to ever more frequent visits to the bathroom (alas, bladder capacity does not increase in proportion to age!), there’s a battered paper cutting of one Brendan Behan, with two vital statistics in the accompanying caption: born, 1923 and died 1964. Just 41-years of age.

A couple of years before hearing the rather shocking news that my neighbour had hit the ‘big four O’, I remember hearing on a news bulletin that ‘a great Irish writer’ had died by the name of Behan.

At the time, my father was a great fan of the Evening Herald newspaper and sure enough the following day there were headlines about the death and funeral of Brendan Behan. But then, I thought to myself, wasn’t he old enough at 41 to be moving on to heaven and all that stuff.

Thankfully, 41 has come and gone for me, but Brendan Behan came back into my head over recent weeks with a lot of column inches and TV/radio programmes about his life and times, 100 years on from his birth, February 9, 1923.

A few years back while on a bit of a holiday break, I made a purchase of Borstal Boy by Behan on the basis that I might read a couple of chapters of it to while away the time. It turned out however to be no chore . . . the most insightful snapshot of a young Dubliner imprisoned as a ‘juvenile’ IRA lad, nabbed before he got the chance of planting a bomb in Liverpool.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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