One of the great challenges facing the government during the votes on Nice, Lisbon 1 and Lisbon 2 was how to get Irish people to recognise or identify with being European. What they needed was the World Cup, and the Living Room on Cathal Brugha Street. This Sunday, look no further as Spain and Holland vie for the best prize left on earth.

The warm, fuzzy glow of victory will be yours to bask in regardless of the winner, but pray for Spics: when they beat the Krauts on Wednesday, the vast, communal smoking area behind the Living Room, the Murray hotel and Fibber Magee’s became a bombastic little corner of Spain. Further down O’Connell Street, they took over the monument and cheered at the honking traffic. This is as close as we’ll ever get to winning the World Cup.

It will be a new experience for the winning nation too, a fact that makes South Africa 2010 memorable in its own right. With the exception of France in 1998, the last country to win the World Cup that wasn’t Germany, Italy, Brazil or Argentina, was England. Those of us who grew up on Euro 88 and Italia 90 are too quick to forget that England, under Bobby Robson, just missed out on a place in the Final in 1990. What an achievement that looks now, some 20 years later.

But forget the statistics, and the punditry too. There’s no Irish manager or set-up to bait and no English team to dissect. You can always get Aprés Match on the web in work on Monday. Instead share this moment of greatness in the lawless forum behind the Living Room. Here, within a glorified yard of red-brick, soot-brown, filthy walls, heave thousands of bra-less Spanish teenagers, and neat, gurning North-Europeans, all in a marvellous absence of oversight.

The crowd stands on seats, tables, crates, anything to catch a glimpse of the big screen, which runs a good six seconds behind the peripheral flat-screen TVs, thereby ensuring all major events in the game are well telegraphed. Tables, chairs and kegs are dragged together to create an uneven terrace, from which everyone can not quite see everything and where no angry neanderthals with headsets tell you to get down.

And, within reason, you can get a drink. Certainly the Spanish lack the local appetite for booze, so the bars are manageable and, happily, the crowd lacks that sulphuric essence of menace that is synonymous with un-policed drinking in Ireland. This kind of atmosphere in Dublin is as rare as the eight weeks of balmy 16-21 degrees we have enjoyed this summer, and it ends this Sunday.

After that, the World Cup is over and proprietorship of the Living Room returns to the mirthless Polish and East Europeans. Being European isn’t all Kinder Bueno and driving on the right, so take the bad with the good and see you for kick off. I recommend the chick-sausage hotdog for a snack, though it’s not for the faint-hearted.