JOAN BULLOCK has a passionate and infectious love of place. The place is lake land, woodland Fermanagh on the Border with Cavan. She is a frontier woman, vibrant with energy. And, for all the terrors of the past, she looks to the future with optimism.
Joan lives in a solid thatched house, built around 1720, at Aghalane Bridge, where the Erne Shannon waterway is joined by the Ballyconnell canal. "It's nice of you to come calling", she says, using the country term for visiting.
The bridge was blown up by the British army in the early 1970s to stop the IRA crossing the Border and killing local Protestants. Some of Joan's relatives were among the victims.
A Protestant, Joan voted for Ken Maginnis in the Westminster election and for an Independent nationalist, Patrick McCaffrey, in the local elections. "Patrick is a good worker", she says.
She hasn't yet fathomed who she'll vote for this time. "A woman maybe, they also tend to get things done. But I wouldn't vote for a militant feminist."
Joan, a farmer, is a widow. Her husband, Story Bullock, died some years ago in his 50s.
Queen Elizabeth presented her with an MBE earlier this year for her cross community work in the Aghalane, Teemore and Derrylin areas of Fermanagh. She was delighted with the award. Congratulations came from as many local Catholics as Protestants.
"We're in an awful muddle", says Joan of the election. "I'd love if there was a whole big shake up and half of the politicians got out of politics and left it to more energetic people."
"I don't see how the talks can work because there are too many men. Men can argue for days in committees over nothing. Women wouldn't have the patience for that, they'd have to be doing something constructive."
Joan is in two minds about the plans to reopen Aghalane Bridge, one of the few cross Border routes which is still closed. Her neighbours and cousins, Tom and Emily Bullock, were murdered by the IRA in 1972.
"It was a terrible time, a time when you just had to button your lip or else you'd be dead", she recalls. "I would have left anytime then, but Story, he wasn't moving for anybody. Things settled when the army blew up the bridge."
Joan remains apprehensive about a new bridge. "It doesn't take much to get people flared up again", she says.
About 15 miles up the road, in Bellanaleck and nearby Enniskillen, live two veterans of the Fermanagh political scene unionist George Cathcart and SDLP councillor Jim Lunny, both in their 85th year.
George served for 50 years as a councillor in Co Fermanagh until the mid 1970s, when his career ended abruptly. At that time, as outgoing chairman of Fermanagh District Council, he used his casting vote to elect Tom Daly, a Catholic and SDLP member, as council chairman. "I was declared an outcast after that", says George. But he has no regrets. "I believe in power sharing."
For all the current political uncertainty, he is convinced that we are in sight of a solution to the Northern conflict. "People are more sensible now. Eventually, they will work together", he says.
Jim Lunny reckons that he's the oldest serving councillor in Northern Ireland. He agrees that attitudes are changing. "When I was a young man, I got a job as a clerk with the electric company because, with the unusual spelling of my surname, my employer thought that I was a Methodist he recalls.
There was deep sectarianism in Enniskillen then, but it has lessened considerably, he says. He has no appetite for the election. "But I feel it in my bones that the IRA will accept peace. I can't imagine them going anywhere if they don't."
