Brendan Behan and the Irish Language: A Reconsideration

46 BRENDAN BEHAN AND THE IRISH LANGUAGE: A RECONSIDERATION1 Brian Ó Conchubhair DOI: https://doi.org/10.14712/2571452X.2024.67.4 Abstract: Brendan Behan played a crucial role in challenging the prevailing rural aesthetic that dominated Irish letters in the 1940s and 1950s. Like Máirtín Ó Cadhain and Flann O’Brien/Myles na gCopaleen, Behan maintained a vexed, and complicated relationship with the Irish language, Irish-language institutions and pressure groups. This essay reconsiders Behan’s relationship with the Irish language and explores some common assumptions to argue that in his life and writing, he successfully and repeatedly challenges and contradicts facile stereotypes and binary opposites about Irish life, culture, and people. Keywords: Brendan Behan, nationalism, Irish Republicanism, social class, stereotypes, prison, language acquisition No, I always wanted to be a writer… The idea that I became a writer in jail is fallacious. Nobody becomes a writer in prison. The only kind of writer you become in prison is a bad writer.2 A reconsideration of when, where, and how Brendan Behan acquired Irish is overdue. To present him as literary Ireland’s ‘bit of rough,’ as an inner-city urchin with little or no Irish that came, accidentally or fortuitously, under Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s spell 1 The author is greatly indebted to Nathalie Lamprecht and Ondřej Pilný in particular, as well as the peer reviewer who made several telling suggestions. This essay builds and draws on important work pertaining to Behan and the Irish language by several scholars, not least of whom include Ríona Ní Fhrighil, Declan Kiberd, Cliona Ní Ríordáin, and Micheál Mac Craith. 2 Sylvère Lotringer, “The Thin Man: An Interview with Brendan Behan,” Field Day Review 1 (2005): 11. Brendan Behan and the Irish Language 47 in prison denies not only Behan’s heritage and upbringing, but Dublin’s inner city’s cultural richness and diversity. The most important state institutions in Brendan Behan’s formation were less state prisons, such as Arbor Hill, Mountjoy, and the Curragh, but rather the schools of North inner-city Dublin. As attractive as it may appear to present Behan as the product of prison radicalization – the romantic idea of the young prisoner discovering a new tradition in prison – the reality is more complicated and nuanced. Perhaps just as the 2023 production of The Quare Fellow by the Abbey Theatre explored the codes and hierarchies of life behind bars, we might explore the codes and hierarchies that colour our understanding of Behan’s childhood, youth, and upbringing. Behan’s life experience, no more than his texts, offers an opportunity to deconstruct closelyobserved stereotypes and lends itself well to an irreverent, de-familiarized take on Irish society and history. In his life and writing, he successfully and repeatedly challenges and contradicts facile stereotypes and binary opposites about Irish life, culture, and people. Behan is the inner-city slum boy who grew up to have hilarious encounters with the Marx Brothers and Jackie Gleason. A young Bob Dylan chased him through Greenwich Village just to say hello, and Steve McQueen pursued him across Hollywood, intent on beating him up. He was invited to President Kennedy’s inauguration – the address on the envelope simply read, ‘Brendan Behan, Dublin’ – but banned from taking part in the New York St Patrick’s Day Parade for presenting the United States with a negative image of Irishness.3 Yet as a bi-sexual, multi-lingual, ex-political prisoner, North-side Dubliner, BBC and CBS TV celebrity, and West End and Broadway playwright, Behan – “the first Irish victim of the cult of celebrity”4 – destabilizes monochromatic sterile depictions of Ireland and Irish culture in the 1940s and 1950s. His life story raises questions about common assumptions that present an Ireland paralyzed by religious traditionalism and material deprivation and beset with censorship, conservative Catholicism, and, inward thinking. To such an Ireland Behan offers a more nuanced and sophisticated image. His lived experience and written work challenge the image of a working-class boy from inner-city Dublin who underwent a transformative change in prison under the influence of a charismatic 3 Paul Howard, “Brendan’s Tragic Voyage: Behan in the USA: The Rise and Fall of the Most Famous Irishman in New York,” Irish Times, 17 May 2014, B11. 4 Howard, “Brendan’s Tragic Voyage,” B11. Brian Ó Conchubhair 48 figure. While Behan is often viewed as a case of Irish exceptionalism and the subject of critical intervention by elite cultural figures while in captivity, he in fact challenges many common assumptions and generalizations about mid-twentiethcentury Ireland. Rather than force Behan’s life into the standard national narrative, such assumptions should be revisited. This essay explores Behan’s relationship with the Irish language and Irish-language literature, and questions various recurring tropes regarding his acquisition of the language. The role of the Irish language in his life and work is often, and mistakenly, coarsened into a binary opposition of Irish/English, Irish Republican/British Unionist, whereas in Behan’s case, when more amply understood, it reveals much that is central to his work. Behan’s life and work offer a lens through which to view the complexity of layered Irishness. Behan highlights the problems of such oversimplification, reductionism, and simplistic critique.5 A certain standard narrative persists that equates Behan’s social origins and the young age at which he left formal education with a lack of knowledge and cultural awareness. Numerous ‘received wisdoms’ and ‘factual givens’ attend many discussions of Behan’s life and his involvement with the Irish-language movement and the Gaeltacht. Even Richard Rankin Russell’s implication that it was “natural” for an IRA prisoner such as Behan to engage with the Irish language and literary tradition although “his knowledge of both was not a mere veneer adopted to legitimize his political outlook at the time, as it was for some IRA prisoners” but born “of a real interest, and partly because of his temperament,” is problematic.6 Here, interest in the Irish language still equates with support of and involvement in violence directed against the State. These are two different things – which sometimes but not always – intersect. As with many aspects of human activity, there are degrees and shades to Irishness, while the “tyranny of the discontinuous mind,” as Richard Dawkins phrases it, seeks a gratuitously manufactured discontinuity in a continuous reality or a continuous variable.7 In this case, it conflates nationalism/Republicanism and the Irish language and draws on an underlying assumption that equates all IRA/political prisoners with language speakers or language learners, thus conflating the political struggle with 5 Wei H. Kao, “Can Minorities Speak in Brendan Behan’s The Hostage?” Postcolonial Text 13, no. 2 (2018): 5. 6 See Richard Rankin Russell, “Brendan Behan’s Lament for Gaelic Ireland: The Quare Fellow,” New Hibernia Review/Iris Éireannach Nua 6, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 73-93. 7 See Richard Dawkins, “The Tyranny of the Discontinuous Mind,” The New Statesman, 9 December 2011. Brendan Behan and the Irish Language 49 the language struggle.8 Raymond J. Porter, among many, attributes Behan’s Irishlanguage ability to study during “his sojourn in Irish prisons,”9 while Colbert Kearney observes the fortuity that Behan’s time in Mountjoy and the Curragh connected him with a number of learned Irish speakers and also coincided with a renewed impetus in Irish-language literature.10 These tropes, to a greater or lesser degree, appear in a wide variety of essays focusing on Behan (including Russell’s excellent essay, as quoted above); they correlate Behan’s interest in and usage of the Irish language to his Republican beliefs and attribute its causation to the latter.11 In Arbour Hill prison, the story goes, he encounters Sean Ó Briain, a native Irish speaker from Kerry with whom he shared a cell,12 who either teaches or improves Behan’s command of Irish to native-speaker level.13 Alternatively, once transferred to Cell/Hut 8 at the Curragh Camp, Behan meets fellow prisoner and native speaker Máirtín Ó Cadhain who again either teaches or improves his Irish and/or introduces him to Irish-language literature, including The Midnight Court, a text frequently cited in connection with Behan. Shortly after leaving the Curragh Camp in July 1943, Behan wrote some poetry, as well as a one-act radio play called Casadh Súgáin Eile (The Twisting of Another Rope). Inspired by Tommy Williams’s state execution, the title punned on Douglas Hyde’s well-known one-act play Casadh an tSúgáin. Subsequently, Gael Linn – a non-governmental national organization founded in 1953 to promote Irish – sponsored his famous trip to the Aran Islands, where Irish served as the vernacular, and a location long associated with highprofile students and scholars. He ultimately, so it goes, becomes disillusioned and moves away from the language and writing in Irish. While most accounts follow this narrative trajectory, some discrepancies exist. Ted E. Boyle states that Behan “largely on his own […] gained an encyclopaedic knowledge of Irish history and of English and Irish literature. He also taught himself Irish so that he could read Gaelic literature,” and while his “Gaelic was so good that he would write plays in it,” his “spoken Irish may not have been as pure as that which he wrote, yet the fact that he could handle the language at all was 8 Were this thesis accurate, the majority of War of Independence and Civil War combatants (i.e., Cumann na nGaedheal and Fianna Fáil) would be Irish speakers. Such was not the case. 9 Raymond J. Porter, Brendan Behan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), 4. 10 Colbert Kearney, “Filíocht Bhreandáin Uí Bheacháin,” Scríobh 3 (1978): 47. 11 What is critical, but often glossed over, is that his family aligned themselves with the socialist wing of the Irish Republican movement. 12 Ulick O’Connor, Brendan Behan (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1970), 115. 13 Ó Briain is depicted as “a walking repository of the Munster Gaelic tradition, Ó Bruadair, Merriman, Ó Súilleabháin and others. He had a copy of Merriman’s Midnight Court with him in prison.” O’Connor, Brendan Behan, 79. Brian Ó Conchubhair 50 exceptional for a man of his background.”14 Ulick O’Connor reports that in the Curragh Camp “he was almost indistinguishable from a native speaker.”15 When the imagined native speaker from the West of Ireland, immersed in the oral and vernacular traditions, a devout Catholic and nationalist, represented the ideal and the iconic, Behan offered an alternative. Like Flann O’Brien/Myles na gCopaleen, he was an urban Irish-language speaker, but unlike O’Brien, he hailed from the working-class inner city. Highly intelligent and largely self-educated, Behan possessed an innate proficiency for language; not only in English, or rather Hiberno-English, his native language, but also in Irish and French. Indeed, The Irish Times remarked that “he talks vigorous and idiomatic French”16 and the 1962 LP record Brendan Behan Sings Irish Folksongs and Ballads contains two songs in Irish that reveal a perfect command of the r caol (the slender r) that serves as a shibboleth for membership of elite Irish speakers. If Behan’s command and knowledge of the Irish language and its literary tradition does not originate from Mountjoy Prison or the Curragh Camp, where might its origins lie? His childhood exposed him to music and a vast repertoire of songs. His uncle Peadar Kearney and his brother Dominic – regardless of Bob Dylan’s opinion17 – achieved fame as renowned song writers and singers. Behan’s mother, Kathleen, was a noted collector of songs and stories, while Stephen Behan also sang. The correlation between language-learning skills and musical aptitude is well attested. A significant correlation exists between grades in ‘foreign’ languages and music; learning skills based on rhythm, singing, and musical perception, as well as musical training enhance the phonological skills required for language acquisition.18 Music and song formed part and parcel of the generational cultural capital the young Behan inherited from his family and its neighbourhood. As Kearney argues, “the gifts which people noticed in the young Brendan were those which would have facilitated language-learning: a fine ear, a prodigious memory and a talent for mimicry.”19 Class-based images and 14 Ted E. Boyle, Brendan Behan (New York: Twayne, 1969), 51. 15 O’Connor, Brendan Behan, 82. 16 “An Irishman’s Diary,” The Irish Times, 19 February 1955, 8. 17 Robert Shelton, No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan (New York: Beech Tree Books, 1986), 213. See also D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary Dont Look Back (1967) and Roland Ellis, “May 8th, 1965: Dylan & Donovan,” Gaslight Records, https:// gaslightrecords.com/articles/dylan-donovan. 18 See P.M. Picciotti et al., “Correlation between Musical Aptitude and Learning Foreign Languages: An Epidemiological Study in Secondary School Italian Students,” Acta Otorhinolaryngol Ital. 38, no. 1 (2018): 51-55. DOI: 10.14639/0392-100X-1103. 19 Colbert Kearney, The Writings of Brendan Behan (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1977), 47. Kearney also argues that Behan “was probably being falsely modest when he alluded to ‘the bit of Irish’ he knew as a result of his formal schooling.” Brendan Behan and the Irish Language 51 presumptions of the incongruity of positive cultural capital emerging from the economically depressed and culturally deprived Northern inner city need to be overcome.20 Behan’s parents, according to Kearney, knew but “a few words of Irish but they used them with pride, teaching their children to respect the language as an aspect of that national independence to which they were committed.”21 The folklore preserved in the Behan home parallels the rich oral tradition found among oral intellectuals in various cultures and it served not only as a conduit for Republican, nationalist and socialist history and ideologies, but as the foundation for a multilingual ability that – once cultivated – later flowered in Behan’s poetry, dramatic writing, radio scripts and Irish Press articles. In 1928, Behan – aged five – attended primary school, the first of many state institutions he frequented during his lifetime. Here, he encountered Sister Monica, among other nuns of whom he spoke fondly in later years. In 1934, aged eleven, he graduated to St. Canice’s Secondary School on North Circular Road, and, in 1937, aged fourteen, his father enrolled him in an apprenticeship at Bolton Street Technical College. Behan attended these schools at the height of the nationbuilding project, including the so-called “gaelicization” of the educational system.22 As the educational system had played a critical role in the nineteenthcentury language shift, the new independent state sought to reverse-engineer the process by also availing of the same means. Infants were initially taught exclusively through Irish; later, after Irish National Teachers Organisation (INTO) protests, instruction in and through the medium of Irish occurred at least one hour 20 See Irving Wardle, “The Sad Death of Brendan Behan,” The Observer, 22 March 1964: “Behan was ill-equipped by upbringing to take care of his talent. His working-class childhood, with its motto of ‘If you’ve got it, spend it,’ followed by his war-time imprisonment for IRA activities, left him without any habit of self-discipline as a writer […].” See also Ulick O’Connor who writes regarding the similarities between a Behan poem and an eighth-century text that despite the striking resemblances of alliteration and assonance, “[i]t is unlikely that Brendan could have read ‘The Questing of Aitherne’ as it was published in an obscure scholarly magazine. Much more probably he had absorbed the essence of Gaelic so thoroughly that he created Gaelic poetry in its original idiom without being conscious of it.” O’Connor, Brendan Behan, 120. However, as Behan had recourse to Ludwig Christian Stern’s German translation of Merriman’s Cúirt an mheadhóin oidhche, published in the Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie (1905), it is not unreasonable to speculate that he may have had access to another Celtic studies journal. 21 Kearney, The Writings of Brendan Behan, 46-47. 22 See Séamas Ó Buachalla, “Educational Policy and the Role of the Irish Language from 1831 to 1981,” European Journal of Education 19, no. 1 (1984): 75-92; John O’Callaghan, “Politics, Policy and History: History Teaching in Irish Secondary Schools 1922-1970,” Études irlandaises 36, no. 1 (2011): 25-41. Brian Ó Conchubhair 52 daily. The same educational ethos prevailed in St. Canice’s, the Christian Brothers’ secondary school which Behan attended, where Brother Creed presided.23 This school, Wall writes, was “conducted by the Irish Christian Brothers, an order that placed great emphasis on the teaching of the Irish language and history.”24 School teachers later recalled his ability to “‘roar out’ endless torrents in the Irish language.”25 In December 1935, The Irish Independent reported of “Fithcheallacht Tré Ghaedhilg” (Chess Through Irish) in St. Canice’s where Members of Clann-na-hÉireann, use Irish exclusively in the game, and they will receive all their instruction from first-class players through the medium of their native tongue. The O’Nolan brothers of Blackrock have interested themselves keenly in the scheme. Schools wishing to avail of instruction in the game through the Irish language should communicate with Mr. G. O’Nolan, 4 Avoca-Tce., Blackrock, Co. Dublin.”26 In 1936, Tomás Ó Deirg (Minister for Education) along with M.V. O’Nolan (Flann O’Brien’s father) – attended St. Canice’s to present Clann na hÉireann badges to 100 boys in the school which boasted 150 members in total. This after-school club ran activities through Irish. Bolton Street, where Behan served his apprenticeship, trained vocational school teachers with a similar stress on Irish and the ability to teach through Irish. At the primary, secondary, and post-secondary level, then, Behan was exposed to a considerable amount of Irish-language material. Additionally, this area was home to O’Toole’s GAA. This club, formed in 1901 at 100 Seville Place, emerged from the Gaelic League branch founded that same year and retained a strong language ethos. Playwright Sean O’Casey, from the same area, joined the Drumcondra Gaelic League in 1906 and became its secretary.27 Closely associated with the Gaelic League branch was the St. Laurence O’Toole Pipe Band, founded in 1910, that elected Tom Clarke as president, and O’Casey, again, as secretary.28 23 For Christian Brothers and the Irish language, see Micheál Ó Cearúil, ed., Gníomhartha na mBráithre Aistí Comórtha ar Ghaelachas na mBráithre Chíostaí (Dublin: Coiscéim, 1996). 24 Brendan Behan, An Giall, ed. Richard Wall (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1987), vii. 25 Michael O’Sullivan, Brendan Behan: A Life (Dublin: Blackwater Press, 1999), 24. 26 “Fithcheallacht Tré Ghaedhilg,” Irish Independent, 12 December 1935, 8. 27 Robert G. Lowrey, “Sean O’Casey,” Dictionary of Irish Biography, https://www.dib.ie/ biography/ocasey-sean-a6553. 28 See “History of the Band,” St. Laurence O’Toole Pipe Band, https://slotpb.com/about.html. Brendan Behan and the Irish Language 53 Behan alluded to the Irish-language aspect of his childhood in an Irish Press article – written in Irish – on St. Patrick’s Day 1955 when he refers to encountering Irish at school: Chuir mise aithne uirthi, is mé ag dul ar scoil. Duine des na Gaeilgeoirí éigeantacha mé. In aon rang amháin liom bhí an Coimisinéir Síochána is óige in Éirinn—níor choimisinéir an uair sin é, ar ndóigh. Agus ball eile den rang, imríonn sé outside left do Brighton and Hove i Sasana, agus deirtear go bhfuil cúpla bliain eile peileadóireachta fágtha ann, go fóill. Bhí an t-oideachas, lán-Ghaelach fé sheol agus spleodar in uair sin [...]. [I came to know it while I was going to school. I’m one of the Compulsory Gaeilgeoirí. In one class with me was the youngest Peace Commissioner in Ireland – he wasn’t a commissioner back then, of course. Another member of the class plays outside left for Brighton and Hove in England and they say he has a few years left in him yet. Irish-language education was in full flow and energy at that time (...).]29 Sean Kavanagh, the Mountjoy Governor and former Gaelic League teacher and timire/community organizer,30 recalled meeting Behan in Mountjoy, where Kavanagh taught Irish language classes to prisoners including, apparently, Behan: When I first knew him Brendan had a good grasp of Irish from his schooldays. He must have worked hard at it in the different prisons for on his release he could write and speak it as fluently as English. Irish classes were carried out on D wing but Brendan was not one for classroom discipline and was just as likely to disturb or distract a class as to be part of it. However he improved his knowledge of it in various ways, and he must have benefitted considerably from the help he got from a fellow prisoner, Sean O’Briain [sic], a teacher and native speaker from Ballyferriter. He had a prodigious memory and even in Mountjoy would recite long passages of poetry and prose from his favourite Irish authors.31 29 Breandán Ó Beacháin [Brendan Behan], “Oighreacht an Ghaeil sa Litríocht,” Irish Press, 17 March 1955, 2. The translation is by the present author. 30 Witness Statement 524, Bureau of Military History 1913-1921. 31 Sean Kavanagh, “In Prison,” in Brendan Behan: Interviews and Recollections, vol. 1, ed. E.H. Mikhail (Toronto: Barnes and Noble, 1982), 14, reprinted from The World of Brendan Behan, ed. Sean McCann (London: New English Library, 1965), 67-70. Brian Ó Conchubhair 54 When CID Detectives in the opening section of Borstal Boy – “in some ways […] The Hostage in reverse”32 – search the sixteen-year-old would-be bomber33 at his lodgings (17 Aubrey Street, Liverpool 6, now waste ground adjacent to the Everton Water Tower), they extract from an inside pocket: my money, a forged travel permit, and a letter which happened to be written in Irish. It was from a boy in Dublin who was sick in bed and wanted me to come and see him. He was a dreary bastard in any language, and I, a goodnatured and affectionate boy, found him distressing to meet and embarrassing to avoid. I would have a good excuse for not meeting him for some time to come. The blonde studied the Gaelic writing over Vereker’s shoulder.34 In the subsequent interview in Liverpool’s Lime Street CID station, Behan discourses on the Irish-language origin of names, referring to the Rev. Patrick Woulfe’s 1923 book Sloinnte Gael agus Gall: Irish Names and Surnames, and decides against correcting his Cork-born interrogator regarding grammatical differences between Irish and Scots-Gaelic as spoken in Nova Scotia.35 Tellingly, however, Behan is communicating in Irish before ever stepping foot inside a prison – British or Irish. At the memoir’s conclusion, it is in Irish he converses with the Immigration Officer as he returns home and re-enters Ireland. In both instances, Irish serves as a marker. Behan exists as a product of the Free State’s Irish language programme and he is a success story – a rarity as is true of him in so many ways. He grew up in North inner-city Dublin, in a diverse community: World War I veterans, Protestants and Republicans. This urban area shared much with Manchester and Liverpool, but it was also an area in which the Irish language was available and present. The religious 32 Fintan O’Toole, “Culture Shock: Brendan Behan – Playwright, Novelist, Terrorist,” Irish Times, 6 September 2014, B8. 33 Cf. Jim Sheridan in “Opinion: Brendan Behan at 100,” Hot Press, 9 February 2023: “When he went to England with the bomb in ’39, and he was caught and it didn’t go off. About a week after he arrived in England, a woman was killed in Coventry with her kid, at a post-box, while she was posting a letter. And Brendan was haunted by this for years, he had severe nightmares about it. Even though it wasn’t his bomb. I remember his wife Beatrice telling me that for years, he was haunted by the mental picture of the woman and the child being blown to bits, and he felt guilty by association.” 34 Brendan Behan, Borstal Boy (Boston: David R. Godine, 1982), 4. 35 Behan, Borstal Boy, 23-24. Brendan Behan and the Irish Language 61 Behan, McCourt continues, never ceased to be a working-class Dublin writer who played a crucial role in challenging the prevailing rural aesthetic that dominated Irish letters in the 1940s and 1950s; that role mirrored the role of Ó Cadhain in complaining that cultural activity in Irish was equally false in that it was folkloric.60 This undermining of national narratives resonated with the work of Flann O’Brien/Myles na gCopaleen and others, who like Ó Cadhain argued that the dominant aesthetic in Irish-language literature misrepresented the lived Gaeltacht reality. John Brannigan sees Behan’s use, or sometimes “counter-use,”61 of the Irish language, “as a space in which to experiment with the relationship between style and contemporary themes, between the apparent solidity of traditional forms and the ‘shocking’ or disorientating effects of new experiences and materials.”62 Behan – like Ó Cadhain and Flann O’Brien – maintained a mixed, vexed, and complicated relationship with the Irish language and Irish-language institutions and pressure groups. In 1956, the UCD Irish language society banned Behan from speaking, but Queen’s University Belfast welcomed him. We see his sense of class loyalty in a 1961 rebuke of John B. Keane, a founding member of the LFM (Language Freedom Movement), who wrote of the Irish language as a threat to the Irish theatre and all things truly Irish. Behan responded in a letter – loaded with fraught references – in The Irish Times: The Irish language is a bloody great land-mine, containing all sorts of explosive material from The Midnight Court to Padraig Pearse’s essay on censors and craw-thumpers. “An Fear Meathta” or “The Rotted Man” Keane should remember that the only Kerry writers known to the outside world are two who thought, spoke and wrote in Irish – in Kerry Irish, at that. They are Tomás Ó Criomhthain and Muiris Ó Suileabháin. Fiche Bliain ag Fás is in the World’s Classics and was reprinted for about the twentieth time only a few weeks ago. An tOileánach was read to Maxim Gorki far away in Red Russia.63 60 See John McCourt, “‘Not Exactly Patterned in the Same Mould’: Behan’s Joyce,” in Reading Brendan Behan, ed. John McCourt (Cork: Cork University Press, 2019), 143-62. See, also, Nathalie Lamprecht, “Class, Sexuality and Nationalism: Identity Building in the Prose Writings of Brendan Behan,” MA thesis, Charles University, Prague, 14-16, https://dspace.cuni.cz/handle/20.500.11956/128107. 61 Jean-Philippe Hentz’s phrase: see Jean-Philippe Hentz, “Brendan Behan’s France. Encounters in Saint-Germain-des-Prés,” Journal of Franco-Irish Studies 1, no. 1 (2008): 54. 62 John Brannigan, Brendan Behan: Cultural Nationalism and the Revisionist Writer (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002), 65. 63 Brendan Behan, “The Language,” Irish Times, 17 January 1961, 5. Brian Ó Conchubhair 62 Here, the ‘uneducated,’ ‘uncultured,’ ‘lower-class’ peasants – like Behan – have achieved international success, while the respectable middle-class provincial pub owner complains about his lack of success. BIBLIOGRAPHY Behan, Brendan. “The Bible in Irish.” Irish Times, 18 July 1955, 5. Behan, Brendan. Borstal Boy. Boston: David R. Godine, 1982. Behan, Brendan. 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