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
Yeah, well said. That's definitely true. Interesting to call it 'the conversation' but it makes a lot of sense. We do try to zero-in on possible acquaintances when we meet. I also like your theory on why we do this, and to add to it, I believe that, ironically, emigration has a lot to do with it, also. So many people moved abroad, even just as far as the UK, and would seek out other Irish for kinship.