My Irish question

A global boom in genealogy is forging new tourist trails. DAVID COHEN joins the trend and goes in search of his mother's unknown origins in Ireland.

-  DAVID COHEN

A few weeks ago, on a nothing old Irish evening, I rambled along the streets of Dublin until I came to the south-eastern suburb of Sandymount and a Michelin-starred gastropub called The Old Spot.

Pausing for a minute, I fished out my phone to see how long it had taken me to arrive at the venue.

About 10 years, give or take.

Inside, a private wedding reception was cranking up. The air was full of jollity, the whiff of vape and the clunk and slide of grog glasses. Ruddy-faced guys nursing their Guinness and chatting. Snake-hipped young women chatting back at them. All green eyes and red-wine lips.

There were maps on the wall of New York City and ink drawings from the University of Dublin's glory sporting days, going all the way back to the economically impoverished 1800s.

Not that anyone was likely to perish from hunger this evening.

Married just days before, the young couple of the night, Molly and Niall, sure picked the place to conclude their nuptials. And a decent band, too.

In a sweet touch, guests had been invited to send along their own requests ahead of the evening. I asked for the traditional ballad Whiskey in the Jar, as it was sonically reinvented in 1972 by another local act, Thin Lizzy.

I'm old enough to remember when the same song was all over the radio in New Zealand. I even remember trying to convince an older Irish woman I knew of its merits, and I also recall her responding, in her characteristically joking-not-joking style that, perhaps, the standard had enjoyed better workouts since it surfaced in its modern form in the 1850s.

Ah, Dublin, "a city where there's familiarity without friendship, loneliness without solitude", as the screwball author Brendan Behan famously remarked.

Then again, Behan lived well before the advent of the internet and its limitless possibilities for making new connections.