The five Catholic youths in this grim story live in Northern Ireland, surrounded as they are by the armed-camp mentality of their adults. They steal a car for a bit of fun, and when they get back, the local IRA chapter sets out to teach them civic responsibility, IRA-style, by breaking one of gang's fingers. They aren't particularly impressed with this lesson and decide that it's the IRA that needs some lessons. This leads to an ever-increasing scale of confrontations between the reckless youths and various authorities and would-be authorities, leavened only by the youngsters' grim, graveyard humor.