The Irish are a small hyperconnected, global community. Having lived in Ireland for a while, the statement above does make me smile, but does not surprise me anymore.

So true. As an Irishman living in Canada, it does not surprise me in the least when I bump into a fellow Irishman and we know some of the same people.

My Canadian friends always think this is strange.

Kind of ironic, since I'm a Canadian living in the US and and every time it comes up, people tell me about who they know that lives in Canada. I realize they are just being polite, they don't expect me to know these people, but I can't help but feel that it's a little ridiculous. How the hell would I know Frank?

My girlfriend always does this to people when she finds out they went to x university. "Oh do you know this or that person". A university with 100k students.

Some people's brains don't consider scale/space when hearing a familiar connection. :p

It happens. I was once in SF talking to a total stranger from LA (pop ~4m) and when I mentioned I grew up in Dallas (pop ~1.3m), she said "oh, do you know [X]?" And I did.

How is this relevant? It seems she was born in Cork to non-Irish parents and returned to England when she was a child. Did she keep a connection to the Irish community? Had her husband any other connection to Ireland?

It's spurious to attribute it to Irishness. More to do with Eminent Victorians than any fantasy of Ireland as a distributed global village.