It’s a funny old game, isn’t it?

HIS DIARY is stuffed with tour dates, the punters are laughing long and loud, TV producers are devising new formats for him to front on a seemingly daily basis.

Little wonder, then, that Dara Ó Briain quickly reveals an optimistic streak.

After considering the permutations, he has decided that Ireland’s passage to Euro 2012 glory is likely to take in a semi-final on June 28. If it does, Ó Briain has a problem, because that evening he is playing Cork’s Marquee.

“What will we do? I wonder could we show the game during the show,” he says.

If we finish runners-up in group C, then topple the winner of England’s group in the quarters, Dara might just have to can the laughter for one night and take on the role of commentator. Sensibly, he has kept the evening of the final free.

Actually, perhaps all this forward planning is less natural confidence and more force of habit. Ireland’s biggest football occasions have found him otherwise occupied.

“Euro ’88 was the Inter Cert, in 1990 I was doing my Leaving, then, in 1994, my finals. It reached a point where I thought ‘I’m not doing any more exams, we’re never going to qualify for anything again’.”

Could he not have repeated a year along the way, to take refuge in odd numbers?

“True, I should have … and think of the impact that could have had on Ireland’s Winter Olympic hopes.”

During Italia ’90, while the nation held its breath, he just about managed to catch his. “I have a vivid memory of rushing out of the Matric (he spits the name of the old plan b for NUI aspirants) and arriving home just in time to wonder why the hell David O’Leary is taking that,” he says.

Stuck in Matric Irish, a gaelgoir who’d coasted an A in the Leaving; file under misspent youth.

Thankfully, our first experience of a major tournament had fallen on a Sunday. Unsurprisingly, Ó Briain’s clearest recollection of the win over England in Stuttgart is of Liam Brady, even though Chippy missed out on selection through suspension and injury. “The most vivid memory I have of Euro ’88 is Brady being patronised by the ITV commentary team. He was doing the pitch-side punditry before the game and they were all giving it the old … ‘Isn’t it a great day out for you guys, a party for the Irish?’ All that rubbish. Cut to 45 minutes later when we were 1-0 up, after the jammiest ping-pong goal in the world — sorry, well-worked training-ground routine — and they went back to Liam and there was just this shit-eating grin on his face. It was fantastic,” he says.

The memory sends him spinning onto one of his specialist subjects; the English and their ways. “It’s that clumsy delusion they still have; that they’re a major force in international football. Remember the last World Cup, when they scraped that 1-0 win over Slovenia when they were already running it into the corners with 15 minutes to go.

“And the BBC ran a ludicrously over-the-top musical package afterwards celebrating it and it was all ‘England are back on course to win it’. The thing is if they had just tried to get another goal, they could have avoided the Germans in the next round.”

“You are also constantly astonished by the way they scupper their own team. They undermine them constantly, while, at the same time, insisting they should be winning the thing; then castigate them when they don’t.”

He suspects ideas above their station have infected the early treatment of their new gaffer. “This notion that Roy can’t handle major talent — the English football team is not major talent. It is West Brom,” he says.

Living in London, Dara can’t participate as readily as he once did in what he calls our ‘national sport’; chuckling at our old enemy’s never-ending supply of disappointments.

“I’ve had to tone that one down. It’s just too easy and it does get a little bit petty if you’re constantly taking the piss out of your friends and loved ones.

“It’s reduced now to a sort of knowing smirk. I was at the house of a comedian friend, Lee Mack, who had a party for the USA game in 2010. And I’m just standing there, enjoying their enjoyment of it. And then USA score and you could see it coming a mile away and you’re just… oh lads... here you go again,” he says.

There was that single, beautiful evening 24 years ago when we all sampled the delicious tingle of smug superiority that our neighbours enjoy at the beginning of every tournament. Having taken on the USSR as equals in Gelsenkirchen, we were football aristocrats and we were going to win this bloody thing.

“The finest performance ever by an Irish team,” says Dara. “Ronnie Whelan’s bicycle kick; this was not the kind of thing we were brought up to expect seeing; bicycle kicks against Russians.

“By the time we got to Italia ’90, it had all become a bit grim and defensive and, hopefully, we’ll get one in off Quinner’s arse. But those 90 minutes were fantastic. We were kings of the world.”

Of course, like most of our finest hours, it finished level. And Holland would return us to earth three days later. “I have never forgiven Wim Kieft for that dubious, offside, scrambled goal,” he says.

We picture the cruel trajectory of it — Packie Bonner confounded by outlandish spin even a man who knows his physics can’t explain, though Dara does neatly sum up the unfolding horror. “I remember watching it in slow motion as it happened live.”

Ó Briain was sat in a deserted pub in Shepherd’s Bush last November, with just fellow Irish funnyman David O’Doherty for company, when Giovanni Trapattoni’s side confirmed our first return to the European stage.

The downbeat surroundings and job-done formality of that second-leg against Estonia left him a little melancholy. Could the euphoria of those innocent days resurface?

“I just hope it hasn’t been so long since the last Irish qualification, in 2002, that people have forgotten you’re supposed to go to a pub and jump up and down and clear the streets. I hope there will be one of those ‘Who isn’t watching the game?’ reports on the RTÉ news where they go out on the streets to find somebody walking his dog in the silence,” he says. Dara planned to make the Spain game but won’t now be taking the trip to Poland. After six months on the road, wife Susan and two young children are competing fixtures. “Frankly, I’d get murdered. I’m home, drop the bags, and immediately shag off to Gdansk.”

But despite the daunting look of group C, he likes the way the omens have set out their stall. “I’m not going to play down the historical parallels of a grey-haired, foreign man taking the country in the midst of a recession and bringing it to an international football tournament. It worked out quite well for us last time. But it does require all of us. We’ve all got to believe in Tinker Bell. Go with this. And I just hope that early-1990s mania will kick off again. That crazy dream.”

It’s a dream that might just take in a crazy Thursday night by the Lee. Could Ireland have the last laugh?

Dara O'Briain plays Cork Live at the Marquee on June 28 & 29. Ireland's Euro 2012 matches versus Croatia (June 10), Spain (June 14) and Italy (June 18) will also be screened at the Marquee.