Malcolm Gorrill
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Dec 14/01) - Colum McCready says his family's spirit of adventure, and his own desire to "get a life," led to him coming to Canada to live in 1998.

He and three other people became Canadian citizens during a ceremony Dec. 5.

Colum McCready emceed and performed during the community Christmas concert at the Igloo Church last Sunday. McCready recently became a Canadian citizen. - Malcolm Gorrill/NNSL photo

McCready grew up in and around Belfast, Northern Ireland. He explained that his father decided to become a farmer when he was 55.

McCready said his family's spirit of adventure goes back farther than that. His grandfather fought in the First World War, and his great-grandfather took part in the Klondike gold rush.

McCready said that about seven years ago he was a teacher in London, England, and had just gone through a divorce, when he was coming up the escalator and saw an advertisement that said, "Get a life."

"Suddenly it struck me, have I got a life," McCready recalled. "I thought, I don't."

McCready put in his application and in 1998 achieved landed immigrant status and emigrated to Edmonton, where his brother Tom lives.

Before long McCready acted on a job offer in Tsiigehtchic to be project officer for building their new school. After that job ended about a year later, McCready stepped in as senior administrative officer for the community.

This past September McCready moved to Inuvik to become property manager for the NWT at the Gwich'in Development Corp.

"I got seduced by the North, I suppose," McCready said.

"I was curious about it, like a lot of people, like my great-grandfather, who had been on the gold rush."

With a laugh, McCready said, "They say if you stay more than a year in the North that you become a Northern junkie. So I think I'm becoming a Northern junkie."

McCready said the North, and Canada as a whole, is in many ways quite different from where he grew up.

"There's a lot of freedoms here that you don't have back there -- freedom of speech, freedom of association, and free to get a job and not have your religious or ethnic background be a discriminating factor. 'Cause that happened to me many times."

Made welcome

McCready said he was made to feel at home right away once he arrived at Tsiigehtchic.

"They accepted me right away and I became trusted right away, and I liked that. And that bond of trust is still there."

McCready plays several instruments, including the five-string banjo, the piano, and the guitar, and said he's really interested in developing music in the Delta. Accordingly, not along ago he helped found the Fiddlers' Roost group, which holds weekly sessions at the Small Family Hall.

This past summer McCready spent a month back in Ireland, and said it was good to stand along the west shore again, watching the giant waves and feeling the wind blow through his hair.

"But you know, Canada's my home now. It's no longer Ireland," he said.

"I've gone back but I will never return there to live. In life you keep going forward, you don't go back. Put your hand to the plow and keep going."