As a contemporary Northern Irish, Anne Devlin questions the traumaticexperience and memory in personal and national histories of Northern Ireland. TheTroubles-ridden landscape of Northern Ireland turns into a dramatic site in whichAnne Devlin’s heroines negotiate their quests for voice and visibility. In her firstplay, Ourselves Alone (1985), Devlin foregrounds the experiences of women whoare excluded from the public and secluded within their domestic realm. Threeyoung women, Frieda, Josie and Donna, struggle against the isolation and theviolence that permeate their daily lives. What is common to these three women isthat their lives are constructed, controlled, and represented by the men around them.Their personal identities are constantly wiped out by the communal identities.Whether they are career women, political activists, or housewives, there is always aboundary that limits their sphere of action. Furthermore, the idea of home becomesa metaphor for their nation. Far from being a domestic haven, their homes areconstantly disrupted by external violence in war-torn Belfast and their homes turninto an experimental site where men’s national ideology is tried and approved.Here, the male patriarch or father figure comes armed with a specific political andnational stance and the home becomes a microcosm of the nation. Women areexpected to live up to a national ideal in which their primary function is toreproduce the members of the collectives while their home is under constantpatriarchal surveillance. This essay focuses on questions of home, gender andnation and asks how the seemingly most private sphere of home has come to beintersected with the public sphere of the nation and, also, how women’s roles areimagined and perpetuated within the frame of national ideology.