IRA icons Bobby Sands MP and Brendan Hughes must be having a right auld chin-wag in eternity as to what they really died for.
The Shinners will be quick to point out – and effectively utilise to the SDLP's demise – the Stormont and council polling day is the exact 30th anniversary of Sands' death in hunger strike in 1981 after 66 days.
His funeral a few days later saw the biggest mobilisation of Catholic opinion in Ireland since the death of IRA legend Michael Collins in the 1920s.
Sinn Féin orchestrated 100,000 nationalists from across the island to converge on Milltown cemetery's republican plot – the first time Northern Catholics had been able to rival Protestant attendances at the annual 12 July Boyne commemoration.
Sands' death, along with his nine fellow hunger strikers, propelled Sinn Féin into the electoral process, a process which sees the party in major positions of influence in both the Dáil and Stormont.
When the Leinster House Shinner team turned up at Stormont to mark the last week of the present Assembly, both Alliance and the Ulster Unionists must have been green with envy at the TDs Sinn Féin has amassed.
The Shinners had 41 MLAs and TDs from across the island. Davy Ford and Tommy Elliott would give their right hands to return to Stormont with 14 MLAs each.
But were these Dublin and Belfast scenarios the ones Bobby Sands died for? And why was senior IRA Belfast commander Brendan Hughes – a veteran of the hunger strike – so bitter against the Sinn Féin leadership before cancer claimed him in 2008?
As Sands lay dying inside the Maze jail, what would have been his reaction if the Grim Reaper had said: "Bobby, on the 30th anniversary of me taking your soul, Sinn Féin will have taken its Dáil seats and will be propping up a partitionist parliament at Stormont with Peter Robinson's DUP!"
Had Sands lived, he and Hughes – not Adams and McGuinness – would have run Sinn Féin. The republican movement which Sands died for is not the same organisation which will commemorate his anniversary by remaining not just the largest Northern nationalist party, but beat the DUP into the First Minister's Office.
Ironically, Sinn Féin is returning to the 1905 roots of its founder Arthur Griffith, who opposed terrorism and was a huge fan of passive resistance.
Griffith's Sinn Féin was not a violent republican death squad, but a separatist party content for Ireland to be a British dominion.
Little wonder when the Shinners celebrated their centenary in 2005, they wanted Griffith airbrushed out.
Republicans have conveniently forgotten that Griffith was the first Irish delegate to agree to the British terms which became the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921.
Would Sands have been as quick to agree the republican climb-down in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, or the complete remodelling of Sinn Féin in the 2006 St Andrews Agreement?
Then again, would Sands even have been at any negotiating table? The republicans who died in 1981 were all committed to the concept of armed struggle.
Maybe the hunger strike was one way of getting these violent republicans out of the way? Hughes suggested before he died himself that some of the hunger strikers could have been saved.
Republicanism can sometimes be a very cruel set of beliefs. As a radical Right-wing Unionist looking in, it seems to have allowed people from its own camp to die needlessly.
Chatting privately to friends of the late Brendan Hughes, I always detect a bitterness at the way The Dark was sidelined in his latter years.
As a Unionist, I fully appreciate how police officers and soldiers can lay down their lives for Queen and country.
But what cause is so great that Sands would starve himself to death? Brendan Hughes was influential in calling off the 1980 hunger strike. I wonder did Sands have the same choice in 1981?
How many people would still be alive today if the republican leadership had not only saved Sands, but also called a permanent ceasefire instead of waiting another 13 years?
