Twenty-one years ago Sean Lynch was an IRA man on the run when he was shot in a field by the SAS as he and Seamus McElwain, both armed with assault rifles, went to inspect a bomb. Today he is a candidate for the Northern Ireland Assembly.
Jailed for 25 years, Mr Lynch served for 12½ before being one of those released under the Good Friday agreement. Since 2002 he has worked as Sinn Féin's full-time constituency manager in Fermanagh South Tyrone.
"If you had told me back then that one day I would be running for Stormont I would have told you that you were mad," he told The Irish Timesthis week as he sat in a house in a remote townland outside Enniskillen.
Currently Sinn Féin holds two seats - Michelle Gildernew, who also holds a Westminster seat, and Tom O'Reilly, who is not standing again, while the SDLP's Tommy Gallagher holds the third Nationalist seat in the constituency, which has a slight Catholic majority.
A full-time party worker for the last five years, Mr Lynch led Ms Gildernew's successful campaign in 2005 to hold on to the Westminster seat she had won in 2001 - the seat that marked Sinn Féin's entry on to the political stage when IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands won the byelection caused by Frank Maguire's death in 1981.
Once the SDLP held the upper hand over Sinn Féin in attracting Nationalist voters in Fermanagh South Tyrone, but Sinn Féin has steadily increased its share in recent years.
Now it holds two Assembly seats here, compared with the SDLP's one.
Sinn Féin dearly wishes to take a third at the expense of the SDLP's Tommy Gallagher, who was elected in 2003 with over 10 per cent of the first preference vote and who was helped over the line by over 2,000 transfers from his running mate Frank Britton.
In 2003, Sinn Féin's Enniskillen-based Joe McHugh lost his seat to his running mate Tom O'Reilly, a result that surprised both of them and many locals. This time Mr McHugh, back on the ticket, has a fight on his hands compared with the high-profile Mr Lynch.
The SDLP's Mr Gallagher, a tough political campaigner, is running alongside South Tyrone-based Vincent Currie, though few, if any, believe that a second seat can be won.
On the Unionist side, Fermanagh South Tyrone was once a bastion for the Ulster Unionists, helped by support from Protestant farmers. However, the party has struggled here as it has elsewhere in more recent years.
In 2003, the party won two seats with Arlene Foster and Tom Elliot, although Ms Foster subsequently defected to the Democratic Unionist Party after she quarrelled repeatedly with the UUP's David Trimble.
Ms Foster held on to her Enniskillen vote in the 2005 local elections for Fermanagh District Council, so expectations are high that she will be returned alongside fellow DUP candidate, the Dungannon-based Maurice Morrow.
The highly-regarded Mr Elliot, a farmer and ex-Ulster Defence Regiment officer from Ballinmallard outside Enniskillen, is expected to hold onto his seat, though it is hard to see his running mate Kenny Donaldson (26) being in the reckoning for the last of the constituency's six Assembly places.
