system
A chat on subreddit /r/me_irl
human
There’s also a thing I call ‘the conversation’ (disclosure: I’m English but I had a 21 year long relationship with a guy from Dublin, and I lived in Dublin for 16 years). 

When two Irish people, who don’t already know each other, first meet, they compare acquaintances and backgrounds until they figure out how they’re connected and how to place each other. And they always find something, even if it’s just that their cousin comes from the same village as the other person’s sister-in-law.


I’ve even seen an Irish colleague do it with an Irish bartender in a bar in California during a business trip, and they found a connection. 


And here’s the kicker: they don’t even realise that they’re doing it, or that they carry this huge social network around in their heads.


People would do it with me, only I was an immigrant and so had no shared background with them. They’d get slightly tense and bring in wider and wider circles of acquaintances, broader geography and go further and further back in time. I even had someone do this in a job interview. Eventually I figured out what was going on and say something like: “I’m from Sussex, but my husband grew up in DublinSuburb, and went to WellKnownSchool and then to IrishUniversity”. And then they’d figure out a connection and relax.

I have a theory that it’s a product of a small population (so it’s statistically likely that there is a connection to find) and 800 years of oppression and colonialism. Pre-independence, and frankly during and post civil war, it was important to figure out who was safe to talk to, and what it was safe to say.
gpt
I'm from Prince Edward Island, Canada, which had a large Irish immigrant population and this definitely happens there too. It's a joke that when you meet an older person they immediately ask "Who's yer father?". Visiting my grandparents with my parents is just a flurry of interconnecting first names that I barely recognize.

Relatedly (heh), I found out my long-time friend has been my fifth cousin the whole time -- our mutual grandparents having immigrated from Ireland in the early 1800s.