The Power of the Irish Small-World Network

5minread · Justnow

John Breslin

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Last evening in Galway, I was meeting with my friend Kevin O’Hara, also known as the Donkeyman after his book “Last of the Donkey Pilgrims” which describes his travels around the coast of Ireland in 1979 with Missie the donkey. It was great to catch up with Kevin since we met in Park House Hotel & Restaurant last year, and Kevin introduced me to various members of the 44-strong CIE Tours group that he leads from the US to Ireland once or twice a year. He said to me, this next woman, who is here with her husband, has an amazing story for you. Just wait for this...

Kevin introduced me to the woman, who I will simply call C as I have not asked for permission to share her name. C had been very ill about a year and a half ago, and after having surgery to address the issue, her brain was seriously affected and she had to recuperate in bed over many weeks and months. She was unable to function normally, carry out simple tasks, concentrate or focus properly, read (which was extremely difficult for her as she loved to read), and so on.

Her daughter brought her a photo book as a gift. She told her: “Mom, I think you’re going to love this. There are lots of photographs of people in here who look like they could be related to us!”, saying this because of their Irish ancestry. C picked up the book, and pretty much fell into the imagery. She pored over the photos of faces and places every day, spending hours and hours looking at it over the course of the next month. She told me that the book, which sat on her bedside table during all that time, was a key part of her recuperation.

As you can probably guess by now, the book that C’s daughter had given her for her recovery was Old Ireland in Colour, co-authored by myself and my colleague Dr Sarah-Anne Buckley from the University of Galway. I was, of course, stunned but so delighted to hear about its powerful and beneficial impact on C, and thanked her for telling me about her amazing and inspirational story. “No, thank you!”, said both C and her husband in unison.

I proceeded to tell them another story about a family member of a long-time professional colleague in the US, who was uncommunicative and unresponsive, but who was also given the Old Ireland in Colour book, and they picked it up to intently focus on a different colourised photograph every day. It led me to wonder if there could be a repeatable pattern to these cases, with the books as a potential form of therapy in similar situations. In another related but unexpected use of the books, Old Ireland in Colour is being used in reminiscence therapy for the elderly in some hospitals, since connecting people to past memories can help them to form better connections to the present.

The small-world network characteristics of Ireland and the Irish always amazes me. I often tell people, if you could take one of those huge blank white walls in a room and draw out the graph of everyone you know and get all of them to draw out who else they know and how they are all linked together, it would be so interesting to view and explore. There are people like Kevin with huge networks, places like Kylemore with half a million visitors a year, and other things we can point to that act as super connectors. More generally, we know that everything is connected in some way or another.

I serendipitously came across Kevin’s book a few years ago through the power of the internet, and it turned out that Kevin had read our Old Ireland in Colour book as his aunt had her own copy. Kevin himself has a written a number of articles that have featured on IrishCentral, and another Irish small world story was featured on IrishCentral in 2021 when local super connector Mary Rodgers of the PorterShed sent a copy of Old Ireland in Colour to her brother in New York, whose friend saw it online and recognised his mother as one of the children in the 1946 cover image.

I am sure you all have your own fascinating Irish network stories... I look forward to hearing more of them!