Brendan McFarlane (born 1951) is an Irish republican activist. Born into a Roman Catholic family, he was brought up in the Ardoyne area of north Belfast, Northern Ireland. At 16, he left Belfast to train as a priest in a north Wales seminary. He joined the Provisional IRA in 1969. Early years McFarlane was brought up in a strongly religious Catholic family in the republican Ardoyne area of North Belfast. He served as an altar boy at the local church, and at the age of 17 joined a missionary school in Wales, where he began training to become a priest. McFarlane joined the Provisional IRA when he was 18 years old, following the outbreak of The Troubles, after he had witnessed the violent disturbances first-hand in 1969. Bayardo Bar attack In 1976, McFarlane was sentenced to life imprisonment in connection with the Bayardo Bar attack on Aberdeen Street in the Protestant Shankill Road district of Belfast, which killed five people (three men and two women) and injured 60 more on 13 August 1975. In a 1995 House of Lords debate, Gerry Fitt, formerly the SDLP MP for West Belfast, alleged that McFarlane had machine-gunned three pedestrians who were passing by the Bayardo as it was blown up. The bar was attacked because it was allegedly frequented by members of the loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). The IRA initially denied it had carried out the attack. The attack occurred against a background of severe sectarian violence. The IRA killed 88 Protestant civilians in similar attacks in 1974–76, in reprisal for loyalist attacks on Catholics, which killed 250 civilians in the same period. According to journalist Peter Taylor, the attack was carried out by the IRA in retaliation for the UVF's ambush of the Dublin-based Miami Showband on 31 July 1975 which had resulted in the shooting deaths of three bandmembers. One of the five people killed in the Bayardo attack was UVF man, Hugh Harris. Maze Prison – hunger strikes and escape McFarlane attempted to escape from the Maze Prison dressed as a priest in 1978. When the bid failed, McFarlane's Special Category Status was withdrawn, and he joined the dirty protest in the H-Blocks. His nickname "Bik" was acquired after the name of a famous Biscuit company MacFarlane Lang, now known as United Biscuits. Fellow prisoner and author of Blanketmen: An Untold Story of the H-Block Hunger Strike, Richard O'Rawe,