Iqaluit (Jul 03/06) - Even after 35 years in Northern Canada, Kieran O'Sullivan's voice still bears a trace of an Irish brogue.

The native of Cork came to Canada for adventure and ended up staying for a career with the Northwest Company, once a branch of the legendary Hudson's Bay company. Itching to travel, O'Sullivan ending up in Edmonton in 1971 and got a job with HBC.

"I took the safe route and came to Canada. I ended up in Yellowknife selling socks," he said. "It was a touch of wanting adventure and a touch of being conservative and getting a job first."

O'Sullivan left what was then seen as a dead-end career in computer programming.

"Of course there was no future in computers," he deadpans.

He ended up seeing more of Canada's north than many native-born Canadians. He's worked in Fort McMurray, Alta., northern B.C., northwestern Ontario and Labrador before getting transferred to Iqaluit in 1995, where he's now the operations manager at Northmart.

Over three and half decades, O'Sullivan has seen a myriad of changes to life in the North, particularly in communications.

High-speed Internet has replaced the often-unreliable radio-telephones. And the Northwest Company's mythical fur-trading origins continue to recede into the past.

"There was less instant communication back in those days and you absorbed stories from old Hudson Bay men about how things were in the 1940s and '50s that tie it all together," O'Sullivan said.

And despite years of jetting around the North, O'Sullivan is settling in Iqaluit, which has seen plenty of changes of its own in the past decade.

"There's more of everything, buildings and services," he said.

And while he returns to his native Ireland every three years or so - O'Sullivan became a Canadian citizen in the late 1970s - Iqaluit is now home for him.

"I was transferred (here), but it's my home, I live here.... I don't want to be a stranger here."