How to discover one's Irish roots while learning not to accept mystery pills from long-lost relatives.

As a shitty bonus, cancer's long killing march through my family.

Generally, diarrhoea is not a good conversation starter.

But it is involved in my trip to County Donegal and the village of Kerrykeel, where I discovered my Irish roots, met distant relatives, and chased the romantic dream I called Ireland.  But the itch for Ireland started years earlier, with stories from my Grandmother and how our family was fed up with being crapped on by the English and, where about half the family in 1904 said enough and set off for Canada. 

When I was 19, I worked on a farm in Altkirch, France, near Strasbourg. Much of my labours involved riding around the French countryside, dropping off bags of milk and making sure that the ones with flies in them were redirected for home consumption. 

Life at home in Winnipeg wasn’t going well, so I escaped to Europe for a volunteer year. I started university at 17, thoroughly unprepared, and enrolled in a difficult pre-veterinary program, which did not go well.

Home life in our two-story turquoise house in Fort Garry, a Winni…