FOR sure, Saturday night's bombing went off outside a largely redundant police station but for anyone watching the machinations of dissident republicans, it's clear the real target was Sinn Féin not the PSNI.
It was no coincidence that Mary Lou McDonald had barely folded her notes and left the stage in the ICC, having delivered a defiant leader's address to a packed convention hall, when the New IRA bomb plan swung into action.
The optics were clear: despite being sidelined and rendered all but unelectable, the New IRA was sending a message in a Calor Gas cylinder to mainstream republicans that the 'war' goes on.
Of course, the harsh reality is that no matter how many 'punishment' shootings or explosive devices the republican splinter group can muster, the war is very much over.
Without parroting Monty Python unduly, the war, in fact, is gone, finito, kaput, terminated and consigned to history.
In fact, anyone under 30 hardly remembers loyalist gun-gangs, British duck patrols or UDR road blocks.
Those over 30 are relieved that they lived through that bleak period and, with the exception of a small coterie of zealots, are determined not to go back to the worst of times.
And why would they? After all as one unionist leader remarked, the IRA's ceasefire and the subsequent peaceful and democratic pursuit of republican aims is the most unsettling development ever to happen to the Union.
Anyone who doesn't believe that has only to observe the unrestrained glee among some unionist leaders at the opportunity to use the Dunmurry attack as a stick with which to beat Sinn Féin.
There are as many brands of republicanism as there are brands of washing powder – we saw more than a few of them on the march this Easter Sunday past. And that's as it should be – rejecting the Good Friday Agreement is a legitimate point of view. Wrong-headed, detached from the real world and blind to the progress of the nationalist community, some might say. But legitimate nonetheless.
What isn't legitimate is to hijack a delivery van and send a terrified worker to do the dirty work of people who have no mandate and no spokesperson willing to debate their corner in this or any other media forum.
This isn't 1976 or 1986. Indeed, the sooner those sending misguided messages from the past cop on that's it's 2026, the sooner the community the armed dissidents claim to represent will reach the goal of Irish unity.
