PJ Gallagher, by his own admission is a blow in to the League of Ireland, but Bohemians has taken such a hold of the well-known comedian and actor’s life that he no longer accepts work offers on a Friday night in case it clashes with a game.

He laughs: "If the League of Ireland was a drug, it’d be the one on the telly with the Garda saying 'Don't go near this, have a few pints instead and stay off the hard stuff because your Mammy hasn't heard of this but it's very dangerous’.

"Once you get on it, you'll never get off it. It's a narcotic. It's too easy to ignore and that's the shame. I was one of them for too long, sitting at home saying 'ah it's probably s****'. But then you go to one game and that's it. You're sucked in. It's changed everything for me and you realise you were an a****** for too long."

Fellow comedian and pal Eric Lalor is a Bohs lifer and was responsible for getting Gallagher involved having asked him to go a gig for the Bohs youths in one of the Dalymount Park bars after the 2017 season.

“Normally I do a gig and I’m literally the first person out the door, but I was just hanging around enjoying the buzz with everybody,” he said.

PJ Gallagher

“I bought a season ticket because of that night and you couldn’t kick me out of the place last season.

“I did a gig ages ago where it put me off football. Having been a lifelong Manchester United fan and all that stuff growing up. It put me off and I got a pain in my hole with the thing. But coming here sparked it and Bohs made me love football again.”

Gallagher’s first game was the ‘Paddy Kavanagh chipper van’ derby between Bohs and arch rivals Shamrock Rovers on the opening day of last season and since then he goes home and away and even sponsored a home game last season.

“There was no getting away from it after that derby,” he said. “It was mad. Proper mad. You had the carry on with the chippie van, the flares going up, some auld fella falling off the end of the stand and I'm thinking ‘this is unbelievable’.

“I've been at Champions League games, World Championship boxing fights, some serious sporting events but I was never as hyper or seen a crowd as energised as that. I’d never seen anything like it in my life.

“I saw Ronaldo - fat Ronaldo - score a f*****g hat-trick at Old Trafford and Beckham’s free-kick and I thought ‘that's as good as it's going to get’ but Bohs-Rovers was better which is hard to believe.

“Dublin GAA is another passion of mine and you can have All-Ireland finals with Cluxton's big kick in 2011, back-to-backs wins, but nothing compared to that night in Dalymount. It was impossible to walk away and say you’re not getting into it.”

Because of his TV work on Naked Camera - where the whistling, newspaper shuffling chancer ‘Jake Stevens’ is one of his best known characters - and also hugely successful The Young Offenders, going unnoticed in the crowd was never going to happen.

The Jake Stevens impressions were going ninety but now he’s just part of the furniture in the Jodi Stand.

“I'm just a fella who’s always around and nobody cares - it's nice,” he said. “Nobody cares who you are here and that's the way it should be. They're more interested in the queue at the bar than me!

“I sense I'm coming into all of this at the beginning of something. I know I’ve missed the hard days, but to me sellout crowds are normal although the older lads tell me I’ve no idea. But they seem to want new people in and I’m one of them.”

Asked to describe Bohs if it were a person, Gallagher laughs and says: “He's like a really sound hipster that you don't want to like at the start but gets under your skin and then you find out you're related!

“It has that old but new feel. There’s a lot of tradition but at the same time it’s reaching up and pulling away. There’s also an obvious contradiction in Bohs but that's part of the charm and they don't try to hide it.

“You come here and it's 'Dalymount, the home of Irish football'. You can see it in the old timers and they love all that. But then you walk into the bar and it's craft beers.

“But there's no big time Charlies and you immediately get the feel of the place. You're halfway through a packet of custard creams at halftime and you're talking to the subs. What’s not to like?"

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