Victims’ campaigner McBride tells of faith and regrets

A VICTIMS’ campaigner who lost his wife in the Shankill bomb has spoken of his regret at the breakdown of his second marriage.

In a wide-ranging interview with the Belfast Telegraph, Alan McBride talked about how his Christian faith helped him after losing his first wife and how his second marriage unravelled. Sharon McBride and her father Desmond Frizzell died in 1993 after a bomb attack on their family shop.

Mr McBride (right) has since been active in peacebuilding and is the co-ordinator of the Wave trauma centre in Belfast.

“My biggest regret is that I messed up my second marriage,” he said. “I was very fortunate to have married two incredible women, one was cruelly taken from me and the other I threw away.

“I will always regret that to my dying day. She was the first person that made me laugh after Sharon died, a beautiful woman in

every way that I never truly appreciated until it was too late.”

During his interview, Mr McBride said he was a Christian “with a small ‘c’” but took comfort from his faith during his darkest days.

“There was a time after the bomb when I couldn’t go near a church, but it wasn’t anything to do with being angry,” he said.

“I wasn’t in the mood to worship with other people and God somehow felt distant. I learned a valuable lesson about Christian faith.

Getting through it was nothing to do with me holding on to God, but everything to do with him holding on to me.”

As a Presbyterian, he said he had been disappointed in a ruling this year on how gay members were treated.

“The word ‘ashamed’ is too strong, but I did feel uncomfortable in the way that the Presbyterian Church handled gay membership,” he said.

Mr McBride said that the message had not been that the Church was “a welcoming space for everyone”.

Read the interview with Alf McCreary on page 32