‘The island of Ireland’

A chara, – With reference to the term “the island of Ireland”, now in common use by the media, I’m wondering if I am missing something here. Is there perhaps some other place “out there” called Ireland that is not in fact an island that might be confused with our own Ireland, and hence the need to refer to this Ireland as “the island of”?

Otherwise, I would have thought that it was fairly obvious that any mass of land or country completely surrounded by water was, by definition, an island.

Can we now look forward to the media expanding the use of this term when referring to the “island of” Britain and the “island of” Australia, for example?

Just wondering. – Yours, etc,