The closest I really get to having a summer tan is when my freckles threaten to join together, so when an online DNA test informed me that I’m 75 per cent Irish, I really wasn’t too surprised. Three-quarters Irish, 15 per cent Scottish and a few nods to Norway, Iceland and northwest Europe for a bit of Viking invasion glamour and that’s me and my pale skin summed up in an email from Ancestry DNA.
I bought the test during the great deranged internet shopping boom of the pandemic era. It was relentlessly advertised to me among the rollerskates, watercolours, a particularly misguided item called a “drying bonnet” and of course the daddy of them all, the acupressure Shakti mat. The DNA kit sat unopened on my desk for about 18 months until a conversation during a therapy session prompted a renewed interest in my provenance.
I’m a person who has struggled greatly with feeling like I don’t belong to this Earth and its people – not in a “I hope a spaceship lands in the Curragh and brings me back to my people on the planet Freck” feelings, but more the sense of disconnect and otherness that can come with depression and hopelessness and that “what’s the point in any of us being here at all?” thought loop that gets in the way of living in the moment. Recognising that identifying myself as a part of Earth’s ecosystem brought me some comfort, I wondered if tracing my roots and seeing evidence of a blood line might also help. So I spat in the tube, sealed it in its biohazard baggie and sent it off.
[ Getting your DNA tested can have disturbing resultsOpens in new window ]
Aside from the confirmation that I’m at least as Irish as a bog body, the results have been somewhat underwhelming, especially as I’m unwilling to fork out further for a monthly subscription to access the really juicy details of a third cousin in Wyoming or which parent I got my aversion to caffeine from. I had been hoping for a little more by way of unknown close relatives based on another very typical Irish trait: secrets and shame. Who among us from rural stock doesn’t have presumed whole swathes of close family we may never meet? I guess when you’re depending on these secret cousins to also spit into the tube and send it off, it might be a bit hit and miss.
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A friend asked if I was worried I might be convicted of a murder now that my DNA is on file somewhere and, actually, it’s the opposite. I’m less likely to commit homicide now that I know I could be scuppered by a single hair or carelessly strewn cigarette butt. Another friend said that they would never willingly give their DNA away and allow a company to profit from it, which throws up the issue of how much personal data we’re giving away on a daily basis. I’ve long been apathetic and wilfully ignorant about the impact of allowing myself to be tracked, my reason being that it doesn’t impact me directly and life is too short to worry about what my grocery habits say about me as long as I’m getting €2 off the peanut butter.
I just wanted to find out if there was anything even remotely “exotic” about my dad’s brown eyes and sallow skin. I’m a data harvester’s dream
This indifference to data collection probably goes hand in hand with my tendency towards nihilism. I know I should care more about how I’m helping mega-companies to build bigger and better ways of controlling and predicting humans. There’s graffiti on a wall near where I live that warns about “sleepwalking into a cashless society” in which our every economic choice is tracked. I get their point but at the same time I’m extremely nosy and just wanted to track down the secret cousins or find out if there was anything even remotely “exotic” about my dad’s brown eyes and sallow skin. I’m a data harvester’s dream.
The most interesting aspect of my DNA report came from ordering the “Traits” kit, which allowed me to discover some of the things influenced by my genetic make-up. My report stated that I’m highly likely to be able to smell asparagus in my urine, to be disgusted by the taste of coriander and to be minimally dependent on caffeine, all of which are true. That’s where the results should have stopped, however. To have it confirmed that my inability to dance, be proficient at playing an instrument or eat spicy foods are all inherent traits just seems rude. At least I can take comfort in the fact that I’m unlikely to ever develop a unibrow. Now that’s good genes.