The film stars Cillian Murphy as a transgender woman foundling searching for love and for her long-lost mother, in small town Ireland and London in the 1970s.

Male at birth, young Patrick is later shown donning a dress and lipstick, which angers her foster family.

Patrick comes out as transgender, renames herself Kitten, also going by Patricia, and approaches Father Liam in confession, asking about Eily, but is rebuffed.

Kitten dismisses Irwin's politics as "serious, serious, serious", but after Lawrence is killed by police detonating a suspected IRA car bomb, she tosses their gun cache into a lake.

Beaten and deprived of sleep, she writes a hyperbolic statement, shown in a fantasy spy film spoof sequence.

As a result, Irwin is killed by the IRA, and Kitten returns home to tend to a pregnant Charlie and reconcile with her priest father.

In the final scene, they run into pregnant Eily and little Patrick at the doctor's office, where Charlie is getting postnatal care.

To prepare for the lead role of Kitten, Murphy studied women's body language and for a few weeks met with a transvestite who instructed him and took him out clubbing with friends.

[3] Neil Jordan and Pat McCabe made big changes to the story in their adaptation of the novel for the silver screen.

The seaside scene between Kitten and Bertie was considered by some to be an allusion to director Jordan's earlier film The Crying Game,[4] which also involved a transgender major character, the IRA, and actor Stephen Rea.

In The Crying Game, Rea's character doesn't realise that the woman he has fallen for and becomes sexually involved with is transgender.