“I can't believe I've lived for 16 years without Patsy,” says Kathleen Gillespie. “I can't believe I've managed that. He was the heart of the family. How did I live?” Kathleen's husband, Patsy, was used by the IRA as a “human bomb” in 1990. He and five British soldiers were killed in the explosion at an army checkpoint just north of the Irish border, near Londonderry.

Patsy was one of the almost 4,000 victims of the conflict in Northern Ireland. Of the dead, 350 were women and girls; nine out of ten, men and boys. Kathleen is one of the many women who were left to cope with their own devastating grief after the murder of their husbands while raising their children alone. Many got little or no compensation from the State.

We are now ten years on from the Good Friday Agreement and one year on from the installation of a new Government at Stormont. People have had a sense that this power-sharing arrangement will last. A long-awaited sense of peace is, finally, beginning to settle in Northern Ireland. But as a journalist who has covered 20 years of the Troubles, I wondered what had happened to the women who had lost loved ones and been left behind? How had they survived? Having gone to countless houses of the bereaved in the immediate aftermath of murders, I was acutely aware that each time I brought a tragic “story” to its close, for the women who were left behind it was really just the beginning.

The Gillespies were a typical working-class Northern Irish couple. They met young, married soon after, had children and worked hard. “Patsy was as near perfect as a man can be,” Kathleen says. “I met him when I was 16 and he was 18. We got engaged on my 17th birthday and married when I was 20, in 1970. We had our first child, who was stillborn, in 1971, then Patrick, Ciaran and Jennifer. That was all I ever wanted: to get married and have wains [wee ones].” Patsy worked in the kitchen at a British army base and had ignored IRA warnings that this was seen as collaboration with the enemy. Jobs in Londonderry were scarce and, anyway, “he wasn't letting the IRA dictate his life”, Kathleen says. It was because he had security clearance to drive through checkpoints that he was uniquely useful to the bombers. They kidnapped him, strapped him into a van loaded with explosives and sent him to his death. Kathleen and her children were held hostage at their home.

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The murder shocked people who had grown inured to the violence. Patsy was a Roman Catholic from a city once dubbed the “capital of injustice” because of Unionist discrimination there, which had led to the start of the Troubles. Patsy was murdered by an organisation that claimed to be engaged in a struggle for the freedom of his people.

Kathleen's priority was to stop her teenage sons seeking revenge. “I was so afraid they would do something stupid,” she says. “Thank God they've turned out all right.” This fear, that their sons would “get caught up”, has been expressed by many women. Northern Irish society is as macho as it is conservative, and many of the thousands of young men who joined the security forces and paramilitary organisations did so to avenge wrongs done to their family or community. Others went rioting. Teenagers whose mothers believed them safely in bed would sneak out of the house to take part in this hazardous and sometimes fatal occupation.

More than a third of those killed between 1966, when the killings began, and 1998, when the Good Friday Agreement brought the beginning of stability, were men under 20. One victim in six was under 19. By no means did all of these young people take part in the violence before their deaths: more than half of the dead in the conflict were ordinary people going about their lives. Women from families that were involved in the security forces or paramilitary organisations often suffered more than one bereavement. One woman from Londonderry lost her husband, a policeman in the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), to IRA gunmen and, several years later, her daughter, who was also in the police.

Although she still lives in the family home, Kathleen's life has changed beyond recognition. She made up her face for her husband's funeral and has never left her house without doing so since. “I didn't want them to see what they had done to me,” she says. She spent years fantasising that her husband had survived, that one day he would ring from Australia and tell her to “bring the wains and come”.

Having worked part time at a supermarket checkout when Patsy was alive, she has trained as a conference facilitator, debated on TV and spoken at international meetings. She has also confronted the IRA about her husband's murder, and has had an apology from a senior member. As Northern Ireland finds political peace, there is a sense that the politicians, who include former combatants, are pushing people to move forwards, leaving behind painful memories of a dirty past. A pressure to forgive and forget. But is that possible for the women who paid the highest price? There is no question of forgiveness, says Kathleen: “All I can try to do is let go of all the anger and hatred.”

Women made efforts to end the conflict. In 1976 Mairead Corrigan helped to found the Peace People, after her sister, Anne Maguire, lost three of her children in an horrific incident: a Provisional IRA driver who had just been shot dead by British soldiers smashed into them as they walked along a road near their home in Belfast. Anne never got over her loss, and killed herself three years later. Corrigan was a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976.

A more sophisticated attempt by women to enter mainstream politics and transform them resulted in Monica McWilliams and Jane Morrice of the Women's Coalition being elected to the first Assembly set up after the Good Friday Agreement. The party lost its seats in the next election, however, and has since folded. On the whole, women in Northern Ireland have stayed within the traditional structures of family, community, church and male-dominated party politics. Women bereaved by the violence relied heavily on their families for support. Even though many played a crucial and courageous role in restraining the violence and holding together a fractured society, after the conflict men are still making most of the decisions.

For Laura Hamill, one of the hardest things to cope with after loyalists from the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) murdered her husband, Pat, in 1987, was being treated like a child again, even though she was the mother of two little girls. “All I could think was, ‘What am I going to do? Where do I go?'” she says. “We didn't even have life insurance.”

She moved into her mother's house for a time. “You just want to be left alone but everyone is giving you advice. When people spoke to me, my mother would answer for me. I hated people looking at me pityingly. You were suffocated.” Worst of all, she found herself going along with this. “It was like I had given up on being me, like I was 14 again.”

Laura's family home had been burnt by loyalists in 1969, and she had lain awake at nights listening to riots and gunfire on the streets of West Belfast. She'd fallen in love with Pat when she and her mother were visiting his family in Leicester; he was her first cousin. The couple lived in England for a while, but Laura missed home: “I never wanted to be one of those Irish people living somewhere else and crying about Ireland.”

Back in Belfast she worried about Pat's English accent and his habit of chatting with British soldiers. But he was soon accepted and popular, though Laura felt that he lacked the local people's instinct for danger. Other times he was “cheeky” to soldiers, and Laura feared they would beat him up, or worse. But it was loyalists who got Pat in the end, with a typical “doorstep killing”. He was chosen simply because he was a Roman Catholic. Laura married again, and has two more children. In 1998, when President Clinton came to Belfast, her daughter Catherine was one of the two children chosen to read out letters they'd written to him. “My first daddy died in the Troubles,” she read. “It was the saddest day of my life. Now it is nice and peaceful ... instead of people shooting and killing.”

The extent of Alice Harper's suffering is breathtaking, and it is humbling to consider how bravely she has coped. Her father, Danny Teggart, was killed by the British Army in 1971 after he was caught out on the streets during the mayhem that followed the introduction of internment without trial. Soldiers claimed that he had bullets in his pockets, but there was no evidence for this, and he was never involved in the IRA. Alice was pregnant at the time. Months later, she bore a stillborn baby boy. Two years later, the IRA murdered her brother, Bernard, after he witnessed an attempted armed robbery. Bernard was 15, but had a mental age of about 9. He and his identical twin, Gerard, were abducted and interrogated, before Bernard was shot and left at the roadside with a sign marked “Tout” (informer) on a string around his neck.

Alice's mother, Bella, had 13 children and, after her husband's murder, relied on Alice and another daughter to help her to raise them. “After Daddy was killed Mummy was doing fine up until Bernard was killed,” says Alice. “After that, she wanted to take her own life. She said, ‘Your daddy was my husband, my best friend and my soulmate, but Bernard was my son. He was part of me. I carried him for nine months'.”

Alice cared for her mother and several of her traumatised siblings, and worked as a carer for the dying. She has spent almost four decades fighting to get the British to admit that her father was innocent, and for the IRA to admit that it shot her brother, and that he was an innocent child. The IRA finally owned up and apologised; the British have yet to do so. “My mother brought us up to forgive,” says Alice. “She said, ‘Let it be'. But it is hard. I am very hurt.”

Perhaps remembering such brutalities and suffering, and not forgetting them, is the key to ensuring a prolonged peace.

Bear In Mind These Dead by Susan McKay, Faber & Faber, £14.99

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