The real-life story of Dublin folk hero and criminal Martin Cahill, who pulled off two daring robberies in Ireland with his team, but attracted unwanted attention from the police, the I.R.A., the U.V.F., and members of his own team.

Nineteen-year-old Danny Flynn is imprisoned for his involvement with the I.R.A. in Belfast. He leaves behind his family and his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, Maggie Hamill. Fourteen years later, Danny is released from prison and returns to his old working class neighborhood to resume his life as a boxer.

Northern Irishwoman Helen Cuffe (Julie Christie) is overwhelmed with sadness when her husband is killed by the Irish Republican Army. She and her teen son, Jack (Frank MacCusker), then move to a tiny town and start life anew. There, Helen meets a mysterious American man named Roger Hawthorne (Donald Sutherland), who is in the area to refurbish an old train station. A romance slowly blossoms between Roger and Helen, but Jack then gets involved with a violent political group, and tragedy looms.

Brendan Behan, a sixteen year-old IRA foot soldier, is going on a bombing mission from Ireland to Liverpool during the second world war. His mission is thwarted when he is apprehended, charged and imprisoned in Borstal, a reform institution for young offenders in East Anglia, England.

A small-time Belfast thief, Gerry Conlon, is wrongly convicted of an IRA bombing in London, along with his father and friends, and spends 15 years in prison fighting to prove his innocence.

In the late 1970s, Cockney crime boss Harold Shand, a gangster trying to become a legitimate property mogul, has big plans to get the American Mafia to bankroll his transformation of a derelict area of London into the possible venue for a future Olympic Games. However, a series of bombings targets his empire on the very weekend the Americans are in town. Shand is convinced there is a traitor in his organization, and sets out to eliminate the rat in typically ruthless fashion.

Irish Republican Army member Fergus forms an unexpected bond with Jody, a kidnapped British soldier in his custody, despite the warnings of fellow IRA members Jude and Maguire. Jody makes Fergus promise he'll visit his girlfriend, Dil, in London, and when Fergus flees to the city, he seeks her out. Hounded by his former IRA colleagues, he finds himself increasingly drawn to the enigmatic, and surprising, Dil.

Geoffrey Carr is a wealthy, key player in Britain's emerging computer industry, and newly married to Frances , a much younger woman, with wilful daughter Clare from a previous marriage. He'll do anything to make them happy, including stretching his finances to buy a Georgian estate in County Wicklow, where Frances grew up. Frank Crossan is an Irish Republican hitman on the run from British authorities. Seeking refuge with old girlfriend Kate, he creates a plan to kidnap a wealthy Brit for a ransom to fund a major arms deal. Their two worlds collide when Frances and Clare are brutally snatched away to a bleak hideaway and taken hostage. Geoffrey initially wants to cave in to the kidnapper's demands “ but nothing is simple when a personal crisis plays out against the forces of political intrigue, high finance and with the eyes of the media on them.

The story of Bobby Sands, the IRA member who led the 1981 hunger strike during The Troubles in which Irish Republican prisoners tried to win political status.

Leo Doyle, a convicted IRA murderer, is released into the community after 14 years in prison on a scheme to rehabilitate former terrorists. He soon finds that the ceasefire has robbed him of both purpose and identity. Relationships with his family are difficult and reach boiling point when they find that he has rekindled his affair with a former fiancee Roisin, now married with three children.

The movie starts at the 1998 bomb attack by the Real IRA at Omagh, Northern Ireland. The attack killed 31 people. Michael Gallagher one of the relatives of the victims starts an examination to bring the people responsible to court.

In 1920s Ireland young doctor Damien O'Donovan prepares to depart for a new job in a London hospital. As he says his goodbyes at a friend's farm, British Black and Tans arrive, and a young man is killed. Damien joins his brother Teddy in the Irish Republican Army, but political events are soon set in motion that tear the brothers apart.