The cemetery itself is easy to find. Coming in to Belfast on the main Dublin road it sprawls across a slight rise to the left, overlooked by an ugly charcoal tip in the back of an adjoining scrapyard.
But the grave is more difficult to locate among the long grass, the weeds and forest of Celtic crosses and marble Marys. The scaffolding from which the television networks so meticulously recorded the ceremony and grief, has gone. The floral wreaths have rotted away and their plastic counterparts in perspex cases are looking weather-beaten, the messages of tribute and farewell fading on the ivory cards.
The black headstone carries the inscription: "Volunteers - Terence O'Neill, Bobby Sands, Joe McDonnell."
Perversely, for an organisation which makes such effective use of legends and martyrs, the IRA has, since 1977 been almost dismissive in the treatment of its dead, burying them three and four to a grave in the new Republican plot, recording only names and "volunteer" status.
But that egalitarian policy is restricted to the cemetery. Outside, a Sands memorabilia industry is thriving: leatherwork bearing his name is being poured out by the amateur craftsmen a the Maze gaol and the Republic's top security prison Portlaoise.
Booklets of his gaol diary and other writings have been published for sale world-wide.
The Ballad of Bobby Sands is on sale as a record, and £1.50 will buy his likeness - together with those of Francis Hughes, Raymond McCreesh and Patsy O'Hara - emblazoned across a tea towel.
The nascent legend of Bobby Sands is difficult to square, even with hindsight with the man I met in Belfast's Maze gaol on March 3, the third day of his hunger strike.
He recorded the meeting with the comment in his diary "Couldn't quite get my flow of thoughts together. I could have said more in a better fashion." It would not have helped. The Northern Ireland Office prohibited publication of the interview as well as impressions of the visit.
The second time I saw Sands, it was with some embarrassment and much bewilderment that I snatched a glance at his rouged face inside the pine coffin at his home in Belfast's Twinbrook Estate.
The embarrassment was in the face of the blank gaze of the theatrically attired IRA guard of honour in dark glasses and the presence of grieving relatives.
The bewilderment was over why a pleasant, seemingly well-balanced man of 27 should starve himself to death for the ill-defined concept of "political statue" which vaguely boiled down to such abstruse issues as whether he or the taxpayer should pay for his garments.
The temptation at this time was to attribute his self-destruction to a personal fanaticism born of teenage grievance (his family were forced out of his childhood home by Protestant intimidation) fostered by youthful romanticism (he joined the IRA at 18), compounded by personal failure (he was separated from his wife, losing a son) and honed by personal experience (he had enjoyed freedom for only six months since his first conviction in 1973).
But the implacable pursuit of this example by Hughes, O'Hara, McCreesh, McDonnell, Lynch, Doherty, McIlwee and Devine militated against any explanation of personal oddity.
The drama of the hunger strike has obscured the marathon prison protest which preceded it and which, even if the fasts had never taken place would have qualified the dispute for description as one of the most extraordinary confrontations between gaolers and the gaoled.
Beginning on September 14,1978, the so-called blanket protest saw hundreds of young men living first of all nearly naked in almost bare cells and then - for about three years - with walls covered by their own excreta.
The prison dispute has produced a sizeable literature on what life was like in the H-Blocks a the Maze during the dispute. Few, if any, of these accounts have been passed on for public consumption by the media on the principle that the claims of convicted criminals must be suspect and because they could not be checked, unpublishable.
But there is a consistency in the accounts of rough treatment which, taken in conjunction with a presumption of animosity on the part of the warders (the IRA killed 18 of their number) makes it likely that hardships caused by the prisoners immediate environment were compounded by the prison administration.
So far as the physical environment was concerned there is, in the August 1978 statement of the Catholic Primate, Cardinal (then Archbishop) Tomas O'Fiach, an account which was reliable both for the identity of its author and the government's response. The Northern Ireland Office did not deny the substance of his allegations, merely retorting that the conditions were self-imposed.
The Cardinal, who had spent a Sunday in the gaol said of the H-blocks; "One would hardly allow an animal to remain in such conditions let alone a human being...The stench and filth in some of the cells, with the remains of rotten food and human excreta scattered around the walls, was almost unbearable. In two I could not speak for fear of vomiting.
The cardinal, added: "It seems they would prefer to face death rather than submit to being classed as criminals." Nearly three years later, Sands confirmed that judgement, marking the first day of his death fast with the diary entry: "I have considered all the arguments and tried every means to avoid what has become the unavoidable: it has been forced upon me and my comrades by 41 years of stark inhumanity."
Despite this assertion that the hunger strike had been forced on the prisoners by "41 years of stark inhumanity," there is, in a later entry the recognition that the fight for changes in the prison regime was part of a wider canvas.
"I am dying not just to attempt to end the barbarity of H-blocks, or to gain the rightful recognition of political prisoners, but primarily because what is lost here is lost for the Republic.
So far as the ideal Irish Republicanism is concerned, the hunger strike - as shown by the new Labour Party policy on Northern Ireland, recent statements by leaders of the Liberals and the Social Democrats - may have started Irish and British politicians down a path towards some form of reunification by bringing about a re-examination of the unionists veto on constitutional change.
The IRA will be counting as gains:
The increased flow of funds and sympathy overseas and in Ireland;
The sense of alienation form the rest of the United Kingdom of many Ulstermen and women as a result of the Government's disparate handling of violence in the province and that in Liverpool and Brixton;
The polarisation of political attitudes in the North and its inhibitory effect on future political initiatives in a purely UK context;
The break in bipartisanship on Northern Ireland at Westminster and of course the graves of new martyrs in County Armagh, County Derry, County Tyrone and Belfast's Milltown cemetery.