When Brendan Behan was 8, he was walking home with his sainted grandmother and one of her friends, when a stranger coming upon them supposedly remarked, "Oh, my! Isn't it terrible ma'am to see such a beautiful child deformed?" To which the old lady indignantly replied: "How dare you! He's not deformed—he's just drunk!"
The story may be apocryphal, but we are forgiven for believing it possesses some grain of truth. Behan did his very best during his short life to live up to that early promise, telling whoever would listen that he was, at heart, "a drinker with a writing problem." In between ritual drinking, and plotting to blow stuff up for the IRA, and prison, he did manage to produce some stories and plays and poems, many written in the Irish (in which I am ignorant, embarrassingly).
The video is Brendan his ownself singing his scathing approximation of British arrogance, The Captains and the Kings:
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