The Emmets are in town and a distinguished lot they are too. Take Edouard Emmet, a retired Paris banker, in Dublin this week with his wife, Linda, daughter of the song writer, Irving Berlin. Or Fiona Gray, a horse breeder who skied in the Winter Olympics and her daughter, Tessa, the third woman jockey to complete the Grand National circuit at Aintree.
Initially they might seem unlikely travelling companions but they have at least one thing in common. They are all related, by birth or marriage, to Robert Emmet and among a 200-strong "Gathering of Emmets" in the capital this week to celebrate the patriot's legacy and that of his older brother, Thomas Addis Emmet.
Their itinerary included a visit yesterday to Green Street courthouse, which now houses the Special Criminal Court and where Emmet made his famous speech from the dock on being sentenced to death for "high treason" in 1803.
Emmet was 25 and unmarried when he was hanged and had no direct descendants. But Thomas Addis, a founder member of the United Irishmen who went on to have a distinguished legal career in New York, including a spell as Attorney General, had 11 children.
The youngest of these, William Colville Emmet, was Edouard Emmet's great grandfather. "It's a big family now," said Edouard, as he and other Emmets from the United States, Britain, France, Holland, Russia and Ireland gathered in the Shelbourne Hotel to begin five days of activities which conclude this Sunday.
Edouard was born in Paris because his father, maintaining something of a family tradition, moved to France to be an ambulance driver during the first World War. Thomas Addis and Robert Emmet both spent time in France seeking support for an uprising to follow the failed rebellion of 1798.
"There was always in the Emmet family a strong connection with France. Whenever I meet Irishmen in Paris they always know about Robert and Thomas Emmet," says Edouard, who was raised in the US but returned to the city of his birth to work in international finance.
He now lives there in retirement with Linda, who was on a family fact-finding mission of her own this week: Irving Berlin stayed in the Shelbourne in 1944. "Oh, you've heard of him?" she asks with genuine surprise when Edouard mentions the connection.
Like many of the group, Edouard has been to Dublin many times and is savouring the city's improving quality of life. "It used to be a bit dreary, without much colour, but now you feel that Ireland does want to belong to Europe."
Rosina Coolidge and her daughter, June Scott, however, had just arrived on their first visit from Boston. "My father was very proud of his Emmet connection," says Mrs Coolidge, whose grandmother was an Emmet. "He always talked about the family and about Robert Emmet."
She likes the idea of the events of 200 years ago "being the beginning of the Irish revolution, which I hope now is complete".
The significance of coming here at another defining moment in Irish politics was lost on nobody. "How serendipitous that during this anniversary year celebrating the group which attempted to bring Protestants and Catholics together under one banner, peace may finally be at hand in this beautiful land," wrote Grenville (Jeremy) Emmet in a welcoming note to all the participants.
As chairman of the organising committee, Jeremy, a commercial radio station owner from Virginia, has spent the past 18 months planning this week's trip.
"I thought it would be a good idea for the 200th anniversary, so I sought out a mailing list and started sending out letters asking people if they would be interested. I got a terrific response," he says.
Such a mailing list might have been impossible to compile were it not for the work of another Emmet descendant, the late Melville Stone, who began a genealogical study on the family in the 1960s. The work was carried on by his daughter, Susanna Doyle, another member of the organising committee.
Now retired after a varied career as a science teacher, Montessori school manager, policy analyst for non-profit organisations and the New York Board of Education, and journalist with the Village Voice, New York-born Susanna was "brought up on stories" about Robert Emmet, and remembers "pictures of him everywhere".
Scottish-born Fiona Gray's grandfather was an Emmet called Robert. She too was reared on stories of Robert Emmet. Otherwise her life could hardly be more different than many of this week's visitors from the major cities of the US. A one-time horse trainer and now breeder, she skied in the 1952 Winter Olympics in Oslo, and was on course for a top 10 finish until she hit a tree stump and came to grief.
Marie Doebler from Martha's Vineyard was told by her mother that Emmet's speech from the dock hung on the wall of every farmhouse in Ireland. On a five-day guided tour here in 1976 she visited a farmhouse and sure enough, there was a copy of the speech hanging up, "so I wasn't disappointed".
Also in the group is Prof Arthur Schlesinger, the noted US historian who once served as special assistant to President John F. Kennedy and who is married to a member of the Emmet clan.
No one should be disappointed today when Ms Frieda Kelly reports that there are at least 15 different versions of the speech from the dock in existence. Ms Kelly, a historian working on a biography of both Robert and Thomas Addis Emmet, will give the group a talk on the two men at the Royal College of Surgeons this morning.
She says some versions of the speech, including one published by the government, were put out to try to discredit him. "In some, the language is very course and one even quotes him as calling the judge "a viper". The National Gallery has the most authentic, she believes. It was written contemporaneously by someone who was present in court.
Emmet was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered but was not subsequently disembowelled - as such a sentence usually involved - out of deference to his aristocratic background. Instead, he was hanged and beheaded. His burial site remains a mystery.
Other events being attended by the group this week include lectures at Dublin Castle tomorrow organised by the Taoiseach's office, a meeting with the US Ambassador, Mrs Jean Kennedy Smith, and a banquet tomorrow night at the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham.