Firbolgs
In 2005, Library Ireland was founded to provide free and accurate information about all aspects of Ireland, its people and its culture. Lady Francesca Wilde provided some interesting information about Firbolgs, early inhabitants of Ireland. Her information indicates that, indeed, Cornishmen might well be the same or a closely related race.
Wilde contends that Firbolgs were shepherds, knowing not much of metallurgy and such once-modern marvels. However, she considers them the start of Irish history, making laws and institutions and establishing a monarchical government at the famous Hill of Tara, the place from which subsequent Irish High Kings ruled. (Ireland was divided into smaller kingdoms, each with its own king who supported the High King.)
Wilde notes that the Firbolgs were a "small, straight-haired, swarthy race" of which a portion still remains.  She quotes an earlier genealogist who described them as "talkative, guileful, strolling, unsteady and promoters of discord.
Wilde thinks perhaps the population so described originate din Greece, as it is the only other place she had seen dark hair and eyelashes with blue or blue-gray eyes.
Of course, being of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, Lady Wilde also characterized these people as lazy, and said they made up the bulk of day-laborers, and those who emigrated to England once a year to work for a while and bring money home.  She noted that they are lazy, "especially during the winter."  Hmmm….if they were pastoral, it would be logical that they had not much to do in winter…..and if the Anglo-Irish had supplanted them on the land……

Well, this is not meant to be a diatribe against the "bloody Brits," but rather an investigation of possible similarities between Cornishmen and Irishmen. As it happens, of course, a great many Cornishmen fain would do what the Irish did, and become a nation in their own right. Note well: a delivery van seen in Cornwall in the summer of 2008 noted that the company in question was "In Cornwall, close to England." Separatist sentiment is very much still present.
Lady Wilde seems to have been more plausible when speaking of the physical characteristics of the Firbolg, however, noting that their heads were oval or long and rather flattened at the sides. And perhaps she is right about their funerary practices: she says that these rath-makers (a rath being an earthen mount supported by wood) "mostly buried their dead with out cremation, and, in case of distinguished personages, beneath the cromlech or tumulus."  She doesn't mention her sources for all this.
In any case, perhaps the best place to look for similarities between Firbolgs and Cornishmen, as between Firbolgs and Irishmen, is in the faces of the population; you can see Celt (as we understand it, being an amalgam of Celtic and prior and subsequent migration) writ large on the faces of Cornishmen and Irishmen alike.
And, too, they both have an unquenchable separatist bent.

Uncanny, unique...
IE, Ireland Explained

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England Southwest, Vol. 1, no. 3