From 1907 to 1914, the lives of numerous inhabitants of Dublin, still under British rule, impact on each other: the young wife of a factory worker, a country girl new to the big city, and her husband, a staunch supporter of the unions; the mighty union leader Jim Larkin; the older priest, who drinks more than is good for him, and his young curate; the delightful tramp Rashers Tierney and his dog Rusty, and several members of the Anglo-Irish gentry, some of them sympathetic to those dependent on them, others less so. The working-class struggle through the nightmare of the Dublin Lockout, when the Catholic Church sided with the industrialists to smash Irish labor's first substantive steps towards unionizing.