I don’t know about you, but every time I look at my phone there’s another story about ‘passport power’. Usually it’s a ranking exercise: which little booklet gets waved through the most borders, where one gets to swan in visa-free, and where one may linger without being treated like a crim.

Increasingly, though, the livelier version of the tale concerns dual nationals here in the South Seas setting off in pursuit of a second passport, particularly if it comes decorated with a sprig of shamrock.

Once upon a time, and not so very long ago, Australians and Kiwis travelled light. We had our thongs and togs. We had our heroic indifference to jet-lag. And we had our own blessed passports – two of the best in the world, it was said, though one hears that boast rather less often nowadays.

Today, the prudent sojourner leaving Auckland or Sydney International for the Emerald Isle packs, at a minimum, noise-cancelling headphones, a universal adaptor and some form of documentary proof that Nana was born in Cork.

And why not? In barely a generation, the Irish passport in our neck of the global woods has gone from ancestral curiosity to what one media outlet (in a phrase too lavish not to steal) hails as the world’s ‘fairy gold dust passport’. You’d be a mug not to get one if you can.

Hence the new-found raid on birth certificates and parish proofs. The numbers are getting as loud as a pub crawl with a bodhrán. Figures from Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs, reported by RNZ and the ABC, show applications from Australians seeking Irish citizenship by descent rose by 133 per cent between 2022 and 2025.

Last year, more than 1,880 Aussies applied through the Foreign Births Register, the highest annual total since electronic records began in 2013. Nearly 800 more had joined the queue by the end of May this year. The Kiwis, meanwhile, remain firmly caught up in the online-passport surge, according to the Irish government.

Economics explains plenty: some of it practical, some of it bleak.

Irish citizens are also citizens of the EU, of course, which gives one the right to live and work anywhere on the Continent. What’s more, the Common Travel Area arrangement with the UK also allows for residency across the Irish Sea. For anyone from our corner of the world planning a stint abroad, sentiment is the least of it.

Bryan O’Mahony, an Irish-born Australian who applied for passports for his daughters, made the wider case succinctly to the ABC: ‘The freedom of movement, freedom of study, freedom of employment and freedom of unrestricted time spent in Europe was a huge motivation to apply for an Irish passport.’

Thus the faintly comic revival of genealogical seriousness among people who could not previously distinguish a great-aunt from a second cousin once removed. Family history has become infrastructure. The old photograph on the sideboard is no longer just grandma peering back from the dim past, looking oddly miffed at somebody having the temerity to snap her image. This woman may well be your next international meal ticket.

Actually, in my case, Nana really was born not too far from Cork, in ancient County Carlow, which is about as Irish as you can possibly get without picking up a mandolin. So was my mother, Mary. For New Zealand-born people like me, the passport question is open and shut: anyone with an Ireland-born parent has automatic Irish citizenship from birth. Which I suppose also makes me a leprecohen – possibly a subject for a less cheerful piece.

When Mary first voyaged Down Under in the 1960s, Australia and New Zealand were two of the wealthiest nations on the planet on a per capita basis. Ireland, by contrast, was economically inauspicious – or, as a bean counter might technically put it, a ‘complete and utter basket case’ – and prone at times to unlovely outbreaks of political and/or clerical lunacy.

She never forgot the ancient vistas of her former land, and the old songs would go on taunting and cheering her in roughly equal measure for the rest of her life. But the idea of ever permanently returning to the Republic was a joke, as it was for almost anybody else of Mary’s generation. Why else would James Joyce have done so much of his most celebrated work while holed up in a French loft in self-imposed exile with the gorgeous, pouting Nora Barnacle?

But if Ireland used to be poor, Irishness was never short of takers. Those decades it spent exporting people also saw the exportation of songs, writers, The Pogues, saints, jokes, fathomlessly deep grudges, St Patrick’s Day, the bloody awful ‘Irish’ pubs and all the rest of it. Much of it is rich nonsense, of course, and some of it is even Guinness-branded nonsense. But nonsense travels. It gives people here at the far end of the world a lineage to step into and, in the present case, a growing queue to join.

In the meantime, the map has flipped. Australia and New Zealand have long since lost their world-beating economic rankings, while Ireland, after the Celtic Tiger’s various deaths and revivals, now finds its per capita wealth among the highest in the world. (Traces of the political lunacy unfortunately remain, and I do apologise to Madame President, Catherine Connolly, queen of the ridiculous flotillas, for raising this awkward matter.)

Still, the current rush is about more than pounds, euros and the opportunity to join the important-people line at immigration. No one waits that eagerly for a document without a bit of magic attached.

To be sure, the Irish passport is useful because of the EU, but it is also desirable because the old story of leaving Ireland now comes with a return ticket. In my house, that ticket is already taking the form of freshly sourced certificates and affidavits for my kids, should they ever wish to join the scramble.

As Peter Ackroyd once wrote in The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, ‘the romance of our native land begins only after we have left home’. What was once departure is now something else. Paperwork. It’s a little burgundy booklet, a bundle of documents, and, if Nana were still around, probably a question about whether any of this gets you a cheaper cup of tea.