Turns out I’m related to Santa, the Eskimos and half of New York
IWAS thinking of standing for the New York County Council. The big thing about standing for the council is to have plenty of relations. I spat it out and now I’m related to half of New York. There was a long-time rumour in the family that we were Spanish blue bloods, descendants of some randy royal who was washed up on a beach in north Kerry from the Spanish Armada. The story goes he seduced one of the great greats with oranges, sherry and baubles.
Did you notice the bit of tabloid writing just there: randy royal?
But the family story is not true. I am, for the most part, just plain ordinary Irish. I took a spit DNA test and the results came in this week. The name of the testing company is withheld, as I had to pay for the test. I’m 93pc Irish and 6pc French-Normanish-English-Welsh. So there you are. And I’m Munster Irish. Come on Munster. Good luck today in the PRO12 final.
There was 1pc left over. The scary bit is I could be kin to Putin, but sometimes when I write these masterpieces, it’s as if I’m being guided by the unseen pens of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, my northern ancestors. The remaining 1pc of my DNA is northern Russia and Finland. It’s possible I could be related to Sibelius, Santa and the Eskimos.
I have no idea how it is I’m a Russian-Finn. I’m addled all week. Were my own people some sort of Vikings who were horrible to monks and nuns? Or maybe herring fisher folk who got lost, hitched a ride home from St Brendan and seduced half of north Kerry? Or revolutionaries on the run? Or cave people? Or killer Celts who spilled more blood than a black pudding maker with the DTs?
But I hate the cold. Sometimes I wear my socks in bed. And I don’t like vodka. It gives me morning sickness, but I love saunas and Russian novels as big and heavy as cement blocks. We are the sum of our parts.
I was hoping there was a little bit of African blood in me. There probably is but it’s too small to show up. Most of us here in western Europe are who we are, and where we are, because of our intrepid ancestors who left the Rift Valley in Kenya for everywhere. Dr Alice Roberts does these brilliant programmes about the origins of all of us for the BBC and it gives me great pleasure to report the only full Irish you will get in this country is on a plate.
So there, ye oul’ racists and xenophobes, ye. We are all a mix. There is no such thing as racial purity. Hitler will be turning in his bunker.
And the migrants coming in now to Ireland will become ancestors in time. The probability is our next taoiseach will be the son of an Indian migrant.
But there’s a downside. Farmers’ sons and daughters had better keep their parents far away from DNA. The only testing allowed on farms should be for TB.
Can you imagine the shock when the email comes in telling your oul’ fella he has a young lad walking around Benalmadena. And it’s all down to a three-minute pissed-up tryst up agin’ the wall outside a club playing Bananarama and Fun Boy Three.
The father forgets to give a wrong name on the test and this pup from out foreign ends up owning half the farm in Carrigthomond. Three minutes, and you slaving away for 20 years. The half-brother never had to pull a calf in the coldest of February. And you worrying if your testicles would ever again descend as you scour dykes on days when Tom Crean would have to wear mittens. The new brother is toasting his toes on a beach while some hot Swedish young wan is nibbling his ear. You’re cutting silage on an hour’s sleep. “That was the dear spit,” says the mother and she bawling. It’s ‘The Field 2’. I have many cousins I know of in New York and all over America. I love them and I often feel the Irish Americans are more Irish than we are. I would be more likely to meet one of my own walking down Bainbridge Avenue in the Bronx than in Church Street here in Listowel.
A whole load of new cousins came up in the search. Hundreds in fact, maybe even thousands, and mostly in New York. I am related to a varied degree of religions and mixed races. I have the usual Irish names for cousins but in there too is a Whittington. I don’t get cats but is Dick Whittington one of our own? I’m related to the Rothenbaums, the Dettlingers, the Somervilles, the Schaans, a Mr Grezelaowski and possibly 3,013 Italians under the code name of Mifamilia.
Get on to this, Fáilte Ireland. Get a campaign going, with grants. And quick, before someone else thinks of it.
Maybe there is a long-lost cousin who has either fallen out with her own or has none of her own to fall out with. She could be worth millions. I would promise to bring her to Mass or the synagogue, and the chiropodist. I’ll bury her with our people and ullagone like a keener at the funeral.
I’ve been watching cute hoors around here for years and they minding far-out relations with apple pies, pilgrimages to Knock and listening rapt to the same old stories as if it were the very first time they heard about the time she knitted the tea cosy that could also be used as a woolly hat. I know how it’s done.
Better me than some cats and dogs home in Brooklyn.