1981. Maeve Sweeney, a young women living in London returns home to visit her Catholic family in Belfast. Her visit brings up memories of her childhood in Northern Ireland. Returning to a Catholic area means living amidst the other side of the political spectrum: nationalist republicanism.
She remembers travelling around the North with her determinedly neutral father, selling cakes from their van, all the time encountering hostility from republicans, unionists, the British Army. As Maeve enters her later teenage years, even her sympathetic boyfriend pressures her to take a stance on the "Northern Question." Unwilling to take sides in a conflict that she sees as based on a mythologised version of the past, Maeve is finally unable to find a place for herself in Northern Irish society and escapes to England.