Alan McBride turned his bitter experience of the Troubles around by working to heal the pain on both sides. He talks to Susan McKay

When Alan McBride talks about dealing with the North's past, and reconciliation, he speaks from hard experience. His first wife, Sharon, was murdered by the IRA in the Shankill bombing of October 1993, along with her father and nine others.

"The hardest thing ever was to tell our two-year-old daughter," he says. "I said to her: 'Mummy is going to be with Jesus for a while.' "

His engagement with the Catholic community began soon after the bomb.

"My life had gone to pieces," he says. "I couldn't go home. I was going mad. I had all this anger in me, but I didn't have a violent bone in my body. It was eating away at me."

He told his story to the nationalist Irish News because "I wanted Catholics to know how I was feeling". He also wrote, nine times, to Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams. The final letter was in Irish. "I have always had a very strong sense of my Irishness and I hated the way Sinn Féin had hijacked the language, as if being Irish was all theirs."

Adams replied. "He said: 'You know, Alan, we understand your hurt, but there is no one working harder for peace than Sinn Féin and the IRA.' "

Around this time the IRA blew up the car of a cleaner at an RUC station. Fred Anthony was killed, and his wife and children were injured, his three-year-old daughter critically. McBride rang the BBC during an interview with Adams and tackled him on air. He also joined the Families Against Intimidation and Terror (Fait) group and confronted Adams in Dublin with a placard saying: "Gerry Adams carried the coffin of the man who murdered my wife." Thomas Begley died planting the Shankill bomb.

The other bomber, Sean Kelly, survived and was jailed. He was released under the Belfast Agreement. McBride, as a supporter of the peace process accepted it. But he isn't convinced that Kelly took responsibility for what he did.

"I picked up a book recently and there was a story in it by Kelly about his mate, Thomas. It was full of references to how determined they were that day not to kill civilians," says McBride. The bomb was planted in a fish shop on a Saturday afternoon.

A turning point for McBride came when he met another former IRA man. "He listened to me and then he said that what happened that day was wrong, and that he as an Irish republican was sorry. That really helped me and it allowed me to listen to him telling his story . . . It is hard to demonise people once you know them. I do believe the republican movement is making genuine efforts to move forward."

He is saddened by the Love Ulster campaign, on its way to Dublin shortly.

"I read their publication and blood was pouring from it," he says. "It was full of horrendous stories of Protestants whose lives were destroyed by the IRA. But there was no acknowledgement that their community had caused pain and grief as well."

Born in 1964, McBride grew up in the loyalist Westland Estate in north Belfast, surrounded by Catholic areas. "We thought the Catholics were trying to drive us out. When I was 10, they built a chapel on the Cavehill Road, and we all came out and blocked the road in protest. I used to riot after school."

At 16, he started work in the butcher's shop where his mother worked on the Shankill. "I worked there for 12 years in a job I detested."

He became "a Christian of the born-again kind" when he was 19, and met Sharon while he was an officer with the Boys' Brigade. "She was my first girlfriend. We fell in love, got married, had our daughter. We were in the Baptist Church. It was all very normal and happy."

A week after Sharon's death, McBride heard he'd got the job she'd pushed him to apply for, as a youth worker. He now works with young people traumatised by the death of a family member in the Troubles, for the victims' group, Wave. He is also involved in the Healing Through Remembrance project, and has completed an MPhil on truth recovery.

"We can't just pretend the past never happened," he says. "We need some sort of a process."

He married his second wife two years ago. They are part of an ecumenical group and recently visited the Cavehill Road church where he'd once protested.

Some of his family are against what he is doing, though he says he will never lose their love and support. If he goes too far away from his community, he will be unable to influence it. "But someone has to put their head above the parapet," he says.

Alan McBride will deliver the annual Bloody Sunday Memorial Lecture in Derry's Guildhall on Friday at 8pm