Exotic surprise on genetic blending is all Greek to me

There’s an oft-quoted line about Daniel O’Connell to the effect that – to put it in polite terms – if you threw a stone anywhere in Ireland back in the day, you’d be almost sure to strike one of his offspring.

And even if it’s apocryphal, it’s fair to assume that if your share a surname with the Great Emancipator, you’re unlikely to be Mexican.

In our case, with the only known foreign relatives in the family tree based in Boston and London – having in all cases headed there from the Galway of their birth – there was even less that screamed exotic on either side of the parental equation.

So it wasn’t with any great trepidation that I took up a clever offer from the good people at Tullamore DEW whiskey recently to track my DNA.

Realistically it would have been surprising if we had roots east of the Shannon – let alone to find we emanated from the loins of the Vikings or the Spanish Armada.

The DNA offer was to celebrate the launch of ‘The Beauty of Blend’, and the three little taster bottles that came with the test kit were indeed most appreciated.

But with time on my hands, a free testing kit and nothing to lose, I followed the instructions to scrape my DNA onto two cotton buds, stick the samples into tiny test tubes and dispatch the whole thing in a padded envelope to the US of A.

Last week the results came in and there was no drama to suggest I’d been accidentally swapped in the maternity unit of the Regional Hospital; I’m almost entirely Celtic in that virtually every root is Irish, Scottish or Welsh.

Not a drop of English blood flows through these veins – but the shock was that I fell just short of full Celtic status.

Because while the sample pronounced me to be 97.2% Irish, Scottish and Welsh, I’m also 2.8% Greek.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.