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The Boyle family, "Captain" Jack, his wife Juno, their son Johnny and daughter Mary, live in the squalor of a two-room Dublin tenement in the twenties. Neither the "Captain", a drunken, malingering former seaman, nor Johnny, horribly wounded fighting for the IRA, do any work at all. This is left to Juno and Mary.
Their lives are considerably brightened up when Charles Bentham, a dapper young schoolmaster, brings news that the "Captain" has inherited a tidy sum. When Bentham sets out to court Mary, and the tenement is refurbished on credit, Juno believes that their fortunes have at last changed.
Unfortunately, the young Bentham is mainly interested in Mary's prospects, and so when he discovers an error in his own drafting of the will that was to have provided the inheritance, which will mean that the Boyle's are penniless, he flees to London leaving Mary pregnant. Her disgrace is quickly followed by the repossession of the furniture and then, disastrously, by Johnny's execution for betraying the Republican cause.
The "Captain" reacts to these reverses with his usual drunken self-pity, finally driving Juno to leave him behind as she and Mary leave Dublin to find a new life.
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