Tony Cascarino won 88 caps for the Republic of Ireland, but his qualification was subjected to needless scrutiny after his international career had ended.

It remains one of those stories repeated time and again in pubs: that Tony Cascarino was ‘not really Irish’, even though he represented the country 88 times across a 14-year international career.

As throwaway trivia goes, it may sound amusing, but it stemmed from a particularly odd set of attitudes from another era.

The former Gillingham, Millwall and Marseille forward played in three major tournaments for the Republic of Ireland: Euro 88, the 1990 World Cup and the 1994 World Cup.

At the time, plenty of nonsense was pushed by sections of the English media and supporters about ‘plastic’ Irish players who had grown up in Britain but were eligible through family ancestry.

And because London-born Cascarino’s path into international football had one added complication, the response to the so-called ‘revelation’ in his autobiography in 2000 became even more severe.

Newspapers seized on Cascarino’s disclosure that his mother had been adopted by Irish parents, as though that changed anything of real substance.

More importantly, Cascarino himself did not even know that his mother had been adopted until 1996, by which point he was already eight years into his international career; she had also been registered in Ireland some years before his debut.

Even so, the fact that she was not Irish by blood briefly led Cascarino to question his own identity, with his first reaction being: “I didn’t qualify for Ireland. I was a fraud. A fake Irishman.”

The Football Association of Ireland later confirmed that Cascarino’s eligibility would still have been valid.

Cascarino now has far fewer doubts about the issue, as he told FourFourTwo.

He said: “My name’s Cascarino, so everybody always assumed I was Italian [in heritage].

“My mum is Teresa O’Malley – her [adopted] family are from Mayo, in Ireland.

“If my name had been O’Malley, not one person on the planet would have questioned me playing for Ireland - but because of my surname, everyone just assumed.

“My grandfather was Michael O’Malley. He lived with us, but he never saw me play for Ireland.

“He’d have been really proud because he loved the country. I never had a second thought about it. When I got the chance to play for Ireland, I didn’t hesitate. I loved it.”