Could you stand by and watch your son starve himself to death for his beliefs? Or would you go against his wishes and save his life even though it meant the defeat of the cause he was willing to die for? A widowed schoolteacher and life-long pacifist, Kathleen Quigley has been careful to stay clear of the war in her native Northern Ireland, instead devoting herself to the care of her three children. She is shaken out of her comfortable existence when her son Gerard is captured along with the fugitive IRA leader Frank Higgins, after a shoot-out with the British army. Gerard's imprisonment and his subsequent participation in the IRA prisoners' protest to be treated as prisoners of war draws Kathleen into Northern Ireland's political conflict and into contact with Higgins' mother Annie, a hardworking farmer and fervent IRA supporter.