She lives in the house her father left on the morning he was killed. Halfway down the driveway, an IRA bomb exploded under his car. His legs were blown off him. Every day – taking her children to school, going shopping or on other routine errands – she passes the spot where the device went off. "The past is all around me," she says.

Sometimes, Manya Dickinson is even frightened getting into her own car: "I'll look under it for a bomb, or I'll imagine I hear a funny noise when I start the engine. When I get past the driveway and onto the road I'll say: 'Thank God, I made it.' I know that's silly but dad's death affected me profoundly."

She'll tell all this to Colonel Gaddafi if she has the chance to meet him next month during the IRA victims' delegation to Tripoli. Libyan Semtex was used in the bomb which killed her father nearly 20 years ago.

"I'll tell Gaddafi how I was 13, and my sister Ashley was 10, when dad died. I'll tell him how dad worshipped his family, how he worked seven days a week to provide for us, how on Sundays he'd take Ashley and I to show-houses he'd built to let us play house.

"I'll tell the Libyans that their actions destroyed our family. I battled severe anorexia and bulimia for years. I still suffer the odd setback. My mother's life was wrecked. My children never knew their grandfather."

Dickinson is one of 179 people bereaved or injured by the IRA who are taking a class action against Libya for compensation. In 1972, Gaddafi started supplying arms to the IRA.

The following year, a ship carrying five tonnes of weaponry from Gaddafi was intercepted off the Waterford coast. In 1987, the Eksund was stopped in French waters. It was carrying 1,000 AK47s, a million rounds of ammunition, 50 surface-to-air missiles and two tonnes of Semtex. It was a huge success for the British but many other Libyan hauls had made it through.

Kenny Graham (46) owned a building company in Kilkeel, Co Down, which supplied materials to the security forces. He'd been threatened by the IRA for years "but he wouldn't give in", Dickinson says.

She was returning from a school hockey trip to Holland on 27 April 1990 when her mother met her off the boat. "She said dad had been killed. They'd divorced four years earlier. The IRA threats had put their marriage under immense pressure. Dad was so careful about his movements. He'd tried to hide it all from mum and to protect us – that placed him under even more strain."

Dickinson's mother believed that had she still been living in the family home, she could have prevented her husband's death: "Dad always checked under his car. But he'd hurt his eye clearing up on a building site so he didn't look that morning. He took a chance. Mum said if she, or my sister Ashley, had still been there they'd have checked the car for him."

At the funeral, Dickinson collapsed onto the church floor as the coffin was carried in: "It was only then I realised he was dead. I was hysterical throughout the service. That pain has never left me. I've grown even angrier with time. All the landmarks of my life – passing exams and my driving test, my 21st birthday – dad wasn't there.

"I married Gary in the Bahamas. I couldn't bear to walk up the aisle at home without dad." Dickinson now lives with her husband and three children in the house her father built for her mother on their marriage, and from where he made his last journey.

"Moving back was a mistake," she says. "There is too much history here. Every room has a memory – some good, some bad. Dad's car windows were shattered in the bomb. The glass still lies hidden in the grassy banks off the driveway. My daughter Kensei cut her finger on a shard as she gathered leaves."

'I know the names of his killers'

Dickinson says her father has missed so much: "Mum miscarried five boys so dad never had a son. He'd have loved my two daughters to pieces but he'd have doted on my wee boy Lennox."

No one was ever arrested for Kenny's murder. "I know the names of his killers," Dickinson says. "I see one in town regularly. He stares at me and I stare at him. Another is on the run in Dundalk.

"Nobody will ever be charged with Dad's death. That makes this Libyan action even more important. It will address the past. By supplying Semtex, Libya is as guilty of murder as the IRA. If we win, other countries which supply terrorists will be warned: 'Stop or you too will face financial punishment.'"

Scotland was "wrong" to free Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, the man convicted of the Lockerbie bomb, when so many innocent victims of Libyan terrorism are still in pain, Dickinson says. "I want to make our suffering real to Libya, to talk about Kenny Graham the man who loved and was loved, not Kenny Graham the statistic. Visiting Libya will help me step into the future."

The delegation will be led by Willie Frazer of IRA victims' group Fair. Also present will be DUP MPs Jeffrey Donaldson and Nigel Dodds; two English MPs; and four victims including Jonathan Ganesh.

"Usually, the biggest drama for a security guard on the nightshift at London Docklands was a break-in or a leaking pipe," Ganesh says. "I was patrolling the street at Canary Wharf at 7pm on 9 February 1996. There was a flash of light, unbelievable noise and then carnage."

Ganesh had been only 25 yards from the 1,000lb lorry bomb which marked the end of the IRA's first ceasefire. "I was buried alive beneath the rubble. I dug myself out, then tried to help others. I waded through rubble searching for those trapped. I told all who could walk to go to the basement car park in case other bombs had been planted on the street."

'Libyan money won't bring him back'

Later, an ambulance crew took him to hospital against his will: "I'd wanted to stay and continue helping." His legs were scarred by glass, his lower body so bruised by rubble "that I'd have passed for a black man". He was left partially deaf in one ear. He still works as a security guard in the Docklands but he wont do street patrols.

Inan Bashir (29) and John Jeffries (31), known as JJ, were killed. They were blown to pieces in the news kiosk they ran and could be identified only from their fingerprints. "I want to tell Gaddafi about my two friends, about how JJ played the guitar in clubs and was always hoping he'd be discovered by a music scout. The songs he'd recorded were played at his funeral," Ganesh says.

"I'll also talk about the 39 people injured. There's an image that the IRA just hit a big commercial target. The bomb devastated London's financial district, but the injured weren't City high-fliers.

"They were cleaners, toilet attendants and security guards. Most were immigrants because immigrants do these low-paid, night-time jobs." Ganesh (36) is the son of immigrants. His mother, Patricia Coll from Limerick, came to London to find work. His father was Sri Lankan.

Gemaa Berezag was a cleaner at Canary Wharf's Midland Bank. Her youngest daughter was sick that night so she stayed at home. Her husband Zaoui did the shift, helped by their son Farid and oldest daughter Layla. Zaoui's head was ripped apart in the blast.

"He was two weeks in a coma," Berezag says. "He came out a totally different person. He has severe brain damage. He can't talk. My son needed an operation to remove metal from his spine. Metal lodged in my daughter's leg. We've had a bad life ever since. I'm a carer now, not a worker. My husband needs 24/7 care. Libyan money won't bring him back but it will help look after him."

Séamus McArdle (27) from south Armagh drove the bomb to London. He was sentenced to 25 years in jail but was released under the Belfast agreement after serving three. Libyan Semtex had been used in the bomb.

"I've more respect for McArdle who put his life in danger by driving the bomb than for the Libyans who supplied the Semtex. They sent weapons from the safety of abroad. They took no risks, they were cowards," says Ganesh.

Gaddafi's son Saif says Libya will challenge the victims' compensation claims in the court. "I hope not," Ganesh says. "Maybe when they hear our stories, they'll see it differently. I'd like an apology too. Libya saying sorry would be the best thing ever."

Seasoned campaigners suspect Libya's current 'opposition' to compensation is merely play-acting and there'll be a prompt U-turn after the victims' stories are heard. Economic reasons mean the country wants to leave its 'rogue state' past behind. The delegation hope to meet Gaddafi himself, not his son.

"He was the man behind the weapons; it's him we must talk to," Ganesh says.

He didn't oppose the release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, who had prostrate cancer: "My mother died of cancer in January. She was 59. I took her back to Ireland to bury her. It's a horrible disease and it was right to show al-Megrahi compassion.

"But his release should have been conditional on there being no hero's welcome in Libya and he should have been placed under house arrest to spend his final months only with his family."

Libya has paid $2.7bn to the families of the 270 people killed at Lockerbie in 1988 on Pan Am flight 103. Willie Frazer says: "It's unfair that the families of Irish or British victims killed at Lockerbie get $10m each, but the Irish or British victims of the Libyan-supplied IRA get nothing."

Frazer views Gaddafi as "a gangster" but won't be hostile to him at any meeting. "In the 1970s, he probably saw nationalists as the victims in Northern Ireland so he helped the IRA, or maybe he was just anti-British.

"Later, Gaddafi was motivated by the US bombing of Tripoli in 1986 in which his daughter died. It wasn't personal with him, it was political. I'm not interested in flowery apologies. I'd like him to say, 'Look, this shouldn't have happened, now let's sort it out.'"

Frazer acknowledges the Libyan president's shrewdness: "Gaddafi is switched on. By helping us, he can continue to reinvent himself and Libya. The compensation secured won't just be shared among the 179 people named on this class action. It will go to as many IRA victims of the conflict – Catholic and Protestant, Irish and British – as ­possible."