Paddy and Mick are eager to out-do each with their war stories, and soon they begin telling the story of Lady Betty, the first and only female executioner in Ireland. We are zipped back to the late 1700s, to a lonely shack on the edge of town where Betty Sugrue and her son Padraic eke out a meagre existence. Told through Paddy and Mick’s distinctive style of storytelling, which involves constantly interrupting each other while arguing about the exact details of the story, we see and hear about the hard and twisted life of Lady Betty.
A woman who performed the heinous act of murdering her own son, who was arrested and sentenced to be hanged, and who, in a bizarre twist of fate on the day of her own execution, hangs every other prisoner there in return for her own life being saved.