Adapting Brendan Behan’s “Borstal Boy” — the legendary Irish playwright’s memoir of his teen stint as an Irish Republican Army prisoner in a British juvenile facility — as a film seems like the most ...

Borstal has become a loaded word. We now associate the prison regime that characterised it with the phrase “Who’s the daddy?” from the controversial film Scum, which featured shocking scenes of ...

The first borstal opened 100 years ago this week, establishing a method of dealing with troubled boys that lasted much of the past century. Here, Ron Lovelock recalls how he came to spend two years in ...

Borstal have shown what a force they are becoming after both their 1st and 2nd XI sides claimed success in the Medway Post-Covid League. The decision of the Kent League to scrap the 2020 season meant ...

It was a colleague I’d done youth work with in the prisons who put me in touch with ITV. Hearing they were making a documentary called Bring Back Borstal? she thought I might be interested. Fourteen ...

He works in mysterious ways.

That we are in the midst of an enduring wave of interest in and appreciation of contemporary Irish writing, and especially Irish women’s writing, both at home and abroad, is an evident truth that is ...

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Like so many of the troubled teenagers she sees, Jenny Molloy, an education and social care expert, was once in care. Today, she is the author of two books and is appears in a TV experiment which sees ...

A 31-year-old has been arrested after a serious assault led to a man being taken to hospital in London. Police were called to Borstal Street, Borstal, near Rochester, at 11.55pm last night following a ...

Brendan Behan, the Irish author and playwright who was almost as famous for prodigious drinking as he was for writing (he died, at 41, in Dublin in 1964), wrote Borstal Boy about his teenage ...

Brendan Behan, the Irish playwright and novelist who drank himself to death at 41, was once a borstal boy himself — unwilling resident of a British reformatory — and “Borstal Boy” is supposedly an ...