Desmond Doyle, 29 a painter and decorator, is married with six children and living in the infamous Fatima Mansions in Dublin in 1953. One day he comes home to find his wife has left him. He decides to go to England to find work and is advised to put his children into the state Industrial Schools system for a short time until he returns. When he returns he is told to his horror that the children have been consigned to the state until they are 16. This is the story of how Desmond Doyle fought the Irish legal system to change the law and win back his family, told through the eyes of Evelyn, Desmond's 9-year-old eldest daughter.