Brennan was born in 1953 in a deprived
area of Northern
Ireland's Belfast. He remembers vividly how his neighbors'
demands for civil rights in the 1960s were met by violence
on the part of Northern Ireland's government forces and
gangs of vigilantes. When his neighbors fought back, he saw
British troops occupy his country, not as impartial peace
keepers, but as allies of Northern Ireland's anti Catholic
government and gangs. When he was 19, he witnessed the
carnage a bomb wreaked on the Catholic patrons of Kelly's
Bar -- the streets were stained with blood and strewn with
body parts. Later, his twin brother and a Catholic co-worker
were abducted from their jobs and tortured for four hours.
Brennan himself was threatened at knife point on his job and
told to quit. He was questioned, detained and beaten by
police and soldiers without provocation literally more often
than he can recall.
Brennan became a political activist around that time.
Since 1972, he has been involved with the Republican
struggle to defend his people's rights, to remove British
troops from Irish soil and to reunite Ireland as one
republic. In 1974, he was interned for a year by British
authorities without being charged with any criminal acts.
In 1976, Brennan was convicted of possessing explosives,
and sentenced to 16 years in the H-Block section of
Belfast's Maze prison.
Brennan continued his struggle against British oppression
in prison, protesting the fact that under Northern Ireland's
new "Diplock" system, Republican suspects were deprived of
the due process legal rights enjoyed by civilians, but were
no longer granted privileges as prisoners of war. Brennan
joined other prisoners in protests. Refusing to wear prison
garb, he was confined, naked, to his cell for three years,
two of those on the dirty protest. At one point he shared a
cell with Bobby Sands, who later died on hunger strike.
The Maze prison is notorious for its lack of human
rights, as evidenced by the reports of a number of
independent observers, including representatives of Amnesty
International.
Brennan escaped from the Maze, along with 37 other
prisoners, in 1983. Soon after, he arrived in the U.S.,
where he lived quietly, working in the construction trade,
living under the name of Pol Morgan. In 1984 he met U.S.
citizen Joanna Volz. They married and together with her
daughter Molly, they lived peacefully in the San Francisco
Bay Area until Brennan was arrested in January 1993 by U.S.
authorities on charges of passport violations and possession
of a firearm.
Brennan and his attorney, James Larson, fought British
attempts to extradite him. The treaty between the U.S. and
Great Britain states that the U.S. can decline to extradite
people who will be subject to political or religious
persecution. Brennan argues that if he were returned to
Northern Ireland, he would be subject to the same kind of
religious and political persecution with which he grew up,
and that as a prison protester and escapee, he would become
a victim of the retaliatory violence that has claimed the
lives of other Republican prisoners. Among other Maze
escapees and prisoners, Seamus McElwaine, Padraig McKearney
and Larry Marley have met violent ends in Northern Ireland.
Held in Bay Area prison cells for 3 years, half that time
in a building without windows, only seeing the sun when he
was taken to court, Brennan was allowed to speak to his
family and friends only over the telephone and through thick
glass. There he began researching and writing about the
Irish-English conflict, contributing to An Phoblacht/Republican
News, Northern California's Anderson Valley Advertiser,
Irish People, San Francisco Chronicle and other
publications, as well as keeping up lively correspondence
with notable figures such as author Noam Chomsky and Nation
columnist Alexander Cockburn. He and fellow Maze escapees
Kevin Artt, Terry Kirby and Jim Smyth (also fighting
extradition from the Bay Area) were named grand marshals of
the 1994 San Francisco St. Patrick's Day Parade
