Frank seeks the father to drink the newborn's allowance

The episode in which Frank searches for his father after the five pounds sent for the new baby disappears into the pubs gives a concrete form to the family’s repeating crisis: money intended to keep a child fed becomes drink, and the children are left to search for the man who has spent it. Frank’s errand unfolds through Limerick’s streets and confessionals, where hunger first drives him to steal and then brings him face to face with a priest’s compassion. He finds his father, but loyalty and the memory of their shared mornings keep him from confronting him.

The money meant for the baby

After Alphie’s baptism, Frank’s grandfather in the North sends a five-pound money order for the baby. Angela cannot leave her bed, so the father says he will cash it at the post office and sends Frank and Malachy home ahead of him. Malachy warns him that the money is for the baby and that he must not spend it on a pint. The warning does not change what happens: the father walks into South’s pub with the money.

Angela understands the danger as soon as the boys return without him. With Alphie in her arms, she tells them to go back and announce publicly that their father is drinking the baby’s money. Her instructions are specific: there is no food in the house, no coal for the fire, and no milk for the baby’s bottle. She expects the boys to make the family’s need visible in the pub, converting a private failure into a public accusation.

Malachy practices the speech loudly as they walk. Frank, however, understands that a declaration alone will not recover the money. The father has left South’s, and he urges Malachy to hurry with him through other pubs before the five pounds is gone. When they cannot find him, Angela sends the boys to search the pubs around the railway station and Naughton’s fish-and-chip shop. Malachy has diarrhea and cannot go far from the bucket, so Frank takes on the search alone.

Hunger in the streets

Frank searches the pubs on Parnell Street and nearby, looking into the women’s snugs and the men’s lavatories. He is hungry, but afraid to go home without having found his father. At Naughton’s, the father is absent; a drunken man is asleep at a table, and his fish and chips lie abandoned in their Limerick Leader wrapping. Frank takes the food before the cat can get it, hides it under his jersey, and eats on the steps at the railway station.

The theft provides immediate relief without ending the crisis. Frank remembers that stealing is a sin and fears that dying that night would send him to hell. Since it is Saturday, he reasons that he can go to confession if the priests are still in their confessionals. The episode thus sets two kinds of necessity against one another: his body needs food, while the religious teaching he has absorbed makes satisfying that need feel like a danger to his soul.

Confession and absolution

Frank goes to the Dominican church on Glentworth Street and confesses the familiar sins before admitting that he stole fish and chips from a drunken man. When the priest asks why, Frank says he was hungry; asked why he was hungry, he explains that there was nothing in his belly. He then gives the larger circumstances: Angela sent him to look for his father in the pubs, and the house has nothing because his father is drinking the five pounds sent from the North for the new baby.

The priest’s silence initially leaves Frank uncertain how his poverty and the theft will be judged. He then explains that he hears the sins of the poor, assigns penance, and bestows absolution, but says he should be on his knees washing their feet. Frank admits that he does not understand. When he asks whether there will be a penance, the priest says there will not. Frank remains convinced that he is doomed until the priest tells him he is forgiven, blesses him in Latin, and asks him to pray for him. The encounter does not erase Frank’s hunger or find the missing money, but it changes the meaning of his theft: the priest treats deprivation, not condemnation, as the central fact of the confession.

Finding the father, withholding the accusation

With his hunger eased, Frank resumes the search and finds his father in Gleeson’s, singing. Frank’s heart pounds, and he is furious enough to imagine running in, kicking him in the leg, and escaping. He does not act on the impulse. He thinks instead of the mornings by the fire when his father tells him stories about Cú Chulainn, De Valera, and Roosevelt, and of the look in his father’s eyes when he is drunk with the baby’s money. Frank connects that look to Eugene’s grief when he searched for Oliver, and decides he may as well go home and say he never found his father.

Angela is in bed with Alphie, while Malachy and Michael sleep upstairs. Frank knows that his father will eventually come home after the pubs close, singing and offering them a penny to die for Ireland. The episode ends not with a recovered five pounds, a public denunciation, or a confrontation, but with Frank’s decision to withhold what he has seen. He distinguishes this loss from the father’s earlier drinking of dole or wages: spending money meant for a new baby, he understands, crosses a line. Yet the son who recognizes that betrayal still cannot bring himself to expose his father, whose stories and earlier intimacy remain part of their bond.

Significance

The episode makes the family’s poverty legible through the intended use of a small, specific sum. The five pounds has a designated purpose—food and care for a newborn—but the father’s drinking diverts it, leaving Angela and the children to manage the consequences. Frank’s search is itself a form of unpaid family labor: he is sent out to locate the missing father and money, while his younger brother remains home sick and his mother cannot leave her bed.

The paired scenes in the pub district and the confessional complicate any simple judgment of right and wrong. Frank condemns his father’s choice, yet steals food because he is hungry; religious fear makes him confess, while the priest’s response recognizes the material conditions behind the act. By ending with Frank’s silence about finding his father, the narrative holds together anger, need, affection, and helplessness without resolving the family’s crisis. The boy has found the man, but not the money or a way to make the household whole.