Dara O'Briain wants Cork to love him
In setting up an interview with fast-talking Irish comedy superstar Dara O’Briain, I was asked would 20 minutes be enough time to get what I needed. I had to chuckle to myself.
For those few who aren’t familiar, Dara O’Briain could give a comfortable blow-by-blow account of the history of the universe in 20 minutes, with time left over to successfully explain the offside rule to a chimp. I was very grateful to get any time at all!
One of the finest comedians and entertainers the country has ever produced, Dara is best known on Irish telly as a panellist on the topical comedy show 'Don’t Feed the Gondolas' in the late '90s, and as the host of 'The Panel' from 2003 to 2006.
He then relocated to the UK where he has hosted hit shows like 'Mock the Week', 'Blockbusters', and 'Robot Wars', as well as documentary-style productions including Stargazing Live with world renowned celebrity scientist Brian Cox. He has also written a number of books spanning various scientific topics.
Dara has been touring his acclaimed new show, ‘Re:Creation’ since the start of 2025 across Ireland and the UK and will be 70 shows deep by the time he returns to Cork for his Live at the Marquee performance on 29 June.
It will be the largest capacity show of his entire tour and a welcome return to a part of Ireland that holds many fond memories for him.
“I've been going to Cork for the best part of 30 years,” says Dara.
“My first proper thing was, I was a regular emcee down in City Limits in the mid-'90s; it was '96, I think… There was even a time when I would do 'Echo Island' in RTÉ and then run to get the 6.30pm train to get down to Cork to host City Limits at 9.30pm. There were a couple of very dodgy touch-and-go moments there.
“I spent a ton of time in Cork back in the '90s. I've gone through my Crane Lane phase, Coburg Street phase, I briefly would hide up in Hayfield Manor, and then got over that and came back into town again. I can trace the appearance and disappearance of cinemas!
“I went down to a wedding in Cork, and I was staying in Jurys and it was a black tie wedding. I couldn't get an ironing board in the room. They brought me down to the bowels of Jurys and I'm ironing the tuxedo shirt and there's a guy beside me goes, ‘What's that for?’. I said it's for a wedding. He looks at me ironing the tuxedo and says, ‘Jesus, who needs security at wedding?’,” laughs Dara.
Dara describes his new show as “a great yarn” and it’s clear he’s very proud of his latest work and is thoroughly enjoying taking it out on the road. His previous show, ‘So… Where Were We?’ dealt in part with his search to find his birth mother. Having found her, naturally, Dara’s new show continues the story.
He explains: “The last show, because I'm butting up against the Irish state and the mistreatment of women in the '70s, it felt more like a personal journey in a sense of, ‘You have to come with me on this’. This new one is just a great story that I was gifted.
“With the last one, there were definitely times where I'd look out from behind the curtain at the audience and go, ‘No I don't think so’. I played literally a cave in Gibraltar, and I said, ‘I don't think this is the place to do a 40 minute journey through the Irish adoption system.”
For a man with a mesmerising ability to say things quickly, Dara explains he still sometimes lets shows go on just a tad too long and is ultimately left with the almost impossible task of cutting large chunks of good material.
“The weird thing that happens is, when you finally settle on a show, as you do it, the bits within it grow longer,” says Dara.
“I do a ‘long’ show, but even I, who loves the sound of his own voice, recognises there's a point where an audience has to be given a break. If you do too long of a first half, they begin to wilt at the end of the second half. You can really feel it and it's too late at that stage to get it back, so you have to keep relatively tight on time.
“You have to slash and just take entire bits of a show and just dump them. It breaks your heart sometimes,” he laments.
Having started out in the business over 30 years ago and done so many different things in his career, Dara says the key to longevity for him has been good fortune and the support of his peers over the years.
“I'm loath to say that there's anything other than luck involved in this, but I will say the one lucky thing is that comedy is a career where you can actually stay at it for a long time. The climb up is less explosive than it is in pop music let's say, where the drop off is commensurately so. You draw a graph of us (comedians), and it slowly gets to a level and hopefully stays on, and then maybe drops down a bit. Whereas, if you're in a pop band, you might get five years of huge fame and then 20 years later, a little peak again where you get this retro thing,” says Dara.
He adds: “I have been doing this long enough to have seen off Take That twice; Girls Aloud, twice; The Spice Girls, three times – so you never quite hit the levels that they do but equally, you can kind of stay in the game a lot longer.”
With so many strings to his bow, Dara says standup remains his calling and that he often turns down broadcasting offers in order to keep himself free for doing what he loves the most.
He says: “It would kill me not to be able to perform.
“You tend to regard every show as being an audition for the next show. That comes from when you're in clubs and it's like, well, do a good set here and we might book you again. There is still a sense of: I'd better do this well because how many bad tours can you do before people go, ‘Hmmm, okay, fine...’? You always have this sense of never being on steady ground. That can't be healthy, can it? Emotionally? That can't be a good thing. But I'm a remarkably content individual.
“I feel I've managed to compartmentalise the sheer emotional grind of doing a thing where you're just asking people to love you. I'm 53! I have a family! Still I'm like, 'Love me, love me, love, me! Ipswich, love me! Colchester, love me, love, me, love me!”
Looking back at how the comedy scene in Ireland and the UK has changed since the '90s, Dara points to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival as a benchmark.
He recalls: “When I did it, it had about 200/250 comedy shows, and I thought, ‘This is the most incredible thing I've ever seen in my life’. There's now 1,200 comedy shows at the Edinburgh Fringe, so if you're coming through now, Christ, it's a dog fight.
“We used to go up with a rough-and-ready type show and you’d use Edinburgh as a preview to get things up and running. That is not a luxury people have anymore. They've got to go in there having previewed from January, and they come in with a big thing. The one flipside is it's also much more collaborative, so people do a lot more of each other’s podcasts and stuff like that, and it's a lot less elbows in clubs.
“In Ireland specifically when I came through, there was a generation appeared in 1995, and that would be Tommy (Tiernan), Jason (Byrne), me, Ed (Byrne), then Deirdre O'Kane, Colin Murphy, David O'Doherty a year later or so. We all came through and kept returning to, say, the Cat Laughs Festival in Kilkenny, and we’d see what each of us is doing and it's basically kept us honest. It was a really nice kind of healthy competition.
“Then there was a bit of a gap and now there seems to be a bit of a circuit again of people coming through who hopefully have that for themselves as well. I had every bit of good luck. I didn't realise it at the time,” says Dara.