When they broke out of Crumlin Road Prison in June 1981, Paul "Dingus" Magee and Angelo Fusco were running into almost 20 years of flight, imprisonment and repeated arrests and court appearances on extradition proceedings.
Their escape, along with six other IRA prisoners, was a major morale boost to the IRA in the throes of the Maze hunger strikes. But for the escapers the exhilaration of the jailbreak soon wore off. Throughout the intervening years and despite the prisoner release schemes in the North, both men remained under warrant to be extradited to serve the sentences imposed on them in 1981.
They escaped the day before they were due to be sentenced for their part in the killing of a British army SAS officer, Capt Herbert Westmacott, who was shot during an ambush on the Antrim Road in Belfast a year earlier. The following day both were sentenced to life imprisonment in their absence.
After the escape, Fusco tried to melt into ordinary day-to-day life with his family in Tralee. But he was arrested in 1982 and served a seven-year sentence in Portlaoise Prison for escaping from custody in Northern Ireland. This, however, did not expunge the warrant for his extradition.
Magee was arrested too, and served a similar sentence in Portlaoise. But on his release he became involved in the bombing campaign in England in the early 1990s. He was captured and sentenced to life imprisonment for his part in the murder of Special Constable Glenn Goodman in Yorkshire in 1992.
The Fusco and Magee cases are among a number of outstanding extradition warrants. A small number of other republicans are still officially sought by the RUC for extradition to Northern Ireland for offences committed, in some cases from the earlier days of the Troubles.
There are also people on the run who are suspected of involvement in offences in Northern Ireland and who expect to be arrested if they return. Among these are well-known republican figures. Rita O'Hare, Sinn Fein's representative in the United States is still, technically, wanted in connection with the shooting of a soldier in west Belfast in October 1971.
Ms O'Hare fled to Dublin and successfully challenged attempts to extradite her. In 1975 she was sentenced to five years' jail for trying to smuggle explosives into the IRA wing of Portlaoise Prison.
A former Fermanagh-South Tyrone MP, Mr Owen Carron, is another person who is understood to still feel unable to return to Northern Ireland.
In a landmark case in April 1990 the Supreme Court rejected an application for Mr Carron's extradition to Northern Ireland on a charge of having an assault rifle in Fermanagh in December 1985, on the grounds that it was a political offence. Mr Carron had absconded while remanded on bail in 1986 and fled south. He settled in Co Leitrim where he works as a schoolteacher and he has not returned to Northern Ireland since as he would face immediate arrest.
The Provisional republican movement is seeking to have these cases cleared up as part of the concluding aspects of the Belfast Agreement arrangements.
The British government is examining ways to clear up the remaining anomalies, such as the outstanding extradition warrants and on-the-run cases. The further reduction in the British military presence in the North and the implementation of the Patten police reforms are being seen as ways of encouraging the IRA to complete the decommissioning process.