Well I've played hundreds of Irish tunes in pubs over the decades, almost all down yer in Cornwall, but I'm not sure that any of those occasions would have qualified as an Irish session. I did go to Dublin once, and went to (and played in) the Cobblestone. The sessions in there were fast, and had their complements of strummers and a dreaded bodhran or two, and admittedly all the tunes were Irish. Quality was high, but were they true sessions or paid gigs?? Another night I went to Hughes' Bar. The session in there was fiddles, flutes and Gay McKeon on the pipes :-) The pace was always very moderate. No drummers, no strummers, no pluckers. Not much conversation or drinking either, just a bunch of excellent players enjoying themselves and playing just for themselves. The next night I went to a pub just round the corner from the Auld Triangle pub, a long way up the hill from the centre of Dublin, I can't remember its name, invited to a session run by a lovely lady called Marion McEvoy. There was a bit of strumming and drumming but it was all in very good taste and I was cordially invited to sit in. Was that a true session? When we played in pubs down the years we always attracted extra customers (we wouldn't have got all that free beer otherwise!), but there was a fair smattering of songs and non-Irish tunes mixed in with the diddley. One aspect that always kept me going was my determination to play just for ourselves and not try to pretend we were putting on some kind of performance for the pub customers. It's great when people enjoy what we do, a bonus I'd say, and there's nowt wrong with the odd singalong song, but generally we just played for each other. I suppose that the big English cities may have sessions that are closer to qualifying as Irish sessions. The past tense signifies that my hearing has let me down enough by now to confine my noodling to my kitchen.