Wit & Attitude Quote by Brendan Behan

Behan’s line detonates like a pub-table grenade: the coarse opener (“What the hell difference…”) isn’t laziness, it’s a refusal. He’s mocking the tidy moral geometry of Irish politics and sectarian sorting, the idea that history can be comfortably read as “our side” and “their side,” with virtue distributed by jersey color. The phrase “left or right” sounds like ordinary ideological shorthand, but in Behan’s mouth it’s also a jab at how quickly revolutionary struggle hardens into party labels, slogans, and bureaucratic positions.

The second sentence does the real damage. “Good men lost on both sides” is the oldest cliché in the reconciliation playbook, and Behan knows it. He uses it anyway, but with a dramatist’s ear for double meaning: it’s both a sincere lament and an accusation. If there were good men on both sides, then whatever machinery demanded their deaths - national mythmaking, militant romanticism, punitive state power - is the real villain. The word “lost” softens “killed,” making the waste feel senseless rather than heroic; it treats the dead as mislaid human beings, not martyrs to be leveraged.

Context matters: Behan wrote out of the aftermath of the Irish revolutionary period and civil conflict, and he had lived the militant life he’s skewering. That biography gives the cynicism its bite. This isn’t centrist both-sidesing; it’s a grief-struck satire of ideological vanity, the kind of line that punctures the room’s righteousness and leaves only the bill: bodies paid for someone else’s certainty.