David Sneyd reports from Prague

BARRY O’BRIEN IS a man without a care in the world right now.

As he sips his pint of Czech lager, wearing one of his favoured Republic of Ireland jerseys, he can sit back on these cobblestone streets in Prague and watch the world go by.

This will soon feel like the centre of the universe for every Irish football supporter as thousands begin to descend on the city ahead of Thursday’s World Cup play-off, but for Donegal native O’Brien this is tranquillity personified.

“The peace and quiet of being able to know you’re not going out to feel fear. There’s no tension,” he tells The Journal.

“Although I heard a sheet of metal drop on the ground in one of the squares earlier, it was a loud bang and my first thought was to back home and what’s been happening there.”

Back home is Abu Dhabi – not Ardara, where he grew up just a few kilometres away from Ireland’s Seamus Coleman, who will take to the pitch at the Fortuna Arena later this week.

The place he now calls home along with his wife, who is also from Ireland, and works as a kindergarten teacher, has been under siege for the last three weeks following Iran’s retaliation to US and Israeli aggression.

As we talk, he shows the latest missile warning alert sent to his phone from authorities. O’Brien managed to get a flight out on Sunday evening, and the following day Abu Dhabi authorities reported that an Indian national had been wounded by falling debris from an intercepted ballistic missile.

“We live in an apartment block, a very residential area with a lot of Irish around it,” O’Brien says.

“But you can see the interceptions happening above you and then the air defence firing from the ground up as well. At night you can see it because they’ve got tracers that follow it.

Whenever we get an alert, we shelter wherever we are, at home or if we’re in a restaurant or something. But you don’t travel when the alerts are going.

“There’s nothing you can do. They’re not going after residential buildings. The only times any of the residential stuff has been hit has been debris from an interception and the massage shell just falls on the building.”

O’Brien mentions at least half a dozen people who have died in this way, it’s part of the reason he has been working remotely and is barred from entering the offices of the American oil and gas company where he works as a lawyer.

“Missile casings have fallen from the sky and killed people in cars. Just driving on the road, the alert goes off.

“Alarms are going off literally every hour or two all night. You literally are watching, and jets flying past. We have a gun-shift patrolling. This is not even an exaggeration. There’s a gun shift patrols at [Al] Reem Island, which is a residential with a gun to shoot down drones.

“You can see the helicopter, it goes over and does laps because it’s next stop Iran. But you can see this… because it’s the quickest, the cheaper way to use gunships to shoot down drones because they don’t travel as fast.

“We’re all experts on Shahed-127 drones now, by the way, because we’ve been hit with over a thousand of them since [this started] three weeks ago, there’s been a thousand drones, and that’s not to mention the missiles.

“Sometimes you don’t need to see it because we know the sound of a missile being intercepted and a drone being intercepted. They’re different sounds. But there’s always constant jets blasting along.

“You hear, not the sonic booms, but you hear the jets blasting around the sky at all times. So the alerts are coming at least one a day on average. Some days you’re getting two.”

For now there is relief. His wife was able to return to Ireland during a recent mid-term break but is now back in Abu Dhabi.

O’Brien is due to join her on Sunday provided his flight home isn’t affected by events in the coming days.

He has secured a ticket among the home fans on Thursday, “beside their ultras apparently”, and is carrying hope of another famous night following on from Troy Parrott’s hat-trick in Budapest.

As one of the early members of the You Boys in Green Supporters’ Club, who helped to establish the singing section behind the goal in the south stand at the Aviva Stadium, he has witnessed Ireland’s play-off heartache up close and personal as a dedicated member of the travelling fanbase.

He was there in Paris in ’09 for Thierry Henry’s infamous handball and watched Christian Eriksen break Ireland’s hearts when Denmark demolished Martin O’Neill’s men in the 2017 play-off.

Today, this week, this moment feels different in every sense for Barry O’Brien.

David Sneyd will be reporting for The Journal from the streets (and bars) of Prague over the coming days as part of the build-up to Ireland’s play-off on Thursday.