'A WOMAN knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea', Balzac once wrote. Rita Talty says she knows the heart too of the man she is going to marry during the summer in Dingle.

"He always does everything with a whole heart," the former New Jersey Rose says of Daithi O Se. "He is very kind and puts everyone before himself. He makes me laugh everyday and we just have a great time together." She laughs that he sings her Lovely Rita, by The Beatles, every day in the home they share in Sandymount.

It is, doubtless, a musical household. Daithi, who first presented the 2010 Rose Of Tralee pageant, says that he first noticed Rita when she did her party piece on stage at the Dome in 2008 -- a ramshackle if spirited version of Pat Shortt's homage to early morning high-cholesterol high-jinks, Jumbo Breakfast Roll. "That song clinched it for me," says Daithi, laughing.

I ask Rita what first caught her eye about the charismatic co-host of RTE's The Daily Show. "What I first noticed about him was his personality," she says. "He was a complete messer, which I liked. Then the more I got to know him, I saw he was caring and selfless."

"I totally believe that what happened was supposed to happen between Rita and I," Daithi says a few days later over Guinness in the Boar's Head in Capel Street, Dublin. "There was a lot of connections as well between Rita and I," the Kerryman smiles, taking a huge gulp of his pint of Arthur G before going on. This is not the drink talking. The connections are well worth hearing.

"We both have birth marks under our left arm -- and the same shaped birth mark. My birthday and her grandmother's birthday are the same. And on my father's birthday, her sister-in-law is in hospital having a baby. There are a few more weird things," he says.

"She is from New York. My parents honeymooned in New York. Her parents honeymooned in Dingle where I'm from. I don't know," he roars with laughter -- the words ringing in his broad West Kerry accent around the pub, "If that doesn't convince you, I don't know what will ... "

Born on June 2, 1976, in Tralee, Daithi Thomas O Se grew up in Dingle, the second youngest of five children. His parents, Maidhc O Se, from Dingle, and Kathleen Fitzgerald, from Castleisland, have been married for 50 years. Having moved separately to the States in 1959 in search of better lives, they met and married there and came home to Ireland in 1969. Two of Daithi's siblings, Kevin and sister Deirdre, were born in America. Danny, his elder brother, was conceived there -- "made in the USA stamped on his arse" he laughs -- and was born in Ireland. Like Daithi and their sister Marianne.

Like her parents before her, Deirdre O Se went to the States, got married and had two children. Deirdre died suddenly on December 9, 2002 of heart failure. Daithi was in America when it happened and has never forgotten that day. He was recording a Christmas show for TG4 in New York and was excited about spending a couple of days with her in Pennsylvania when the filming wrapped. That week, he was talking to her every day on the phone. "She was kind of wondering what this television thing was about because I'd only started in TG4.

"We were close. Deirdre used to send cigarettes home to me when I was in college."

Daithi told her he was going to meet her on the Monday night when his work was done; and that they'd spend five or six days together. "I had a load of toys for her kids."

It started snowing heavily in New York on Thursday morning and they had to stop filming. So Daithi took the train to Pennsylvania that afternoon. "We had a great oul' crack and had a great chat," he remembers, adding that he woke up on Friday morning and went back to New York to film. As he left Deirdre he said: "I'll see you Monday."

Daithi never saw his sister alive again.

At 8am on the Monday, at his motel in New Jersey, Daithi got a call to say Deirdre had passed away. He still can't believe it.

He remembers sitting down and bawling his eyes out. Deirdre was only 34 -- it seems her heart just stopped. "Nobody seemed to know. She had been sick over the weekend, had flu," he says. Deirdre, who had worked in a nursing home, was married to Declan from Athlone. "I remember Declan telling me that she actually died in the morning ... he took the youngest child and put a blanket over her head so she wouldn't see the body."

Daithi says he believes in heaven and hell. It is nothing to do with religion at all, he adds. He believes if you are a good person you go to heaven and if you're not, you go to hell.

"I am a Catholic," he tells me, "I go to Mass every second Sunday. I don't believe everything the priest says from the altar, but I take what I believe to be proper with me. I would be sitting there and taking in the whole thing."

When he was in his teens in Dingle, Daithi didn't want to go to Mass. "It is like every thing else. It is like a crossword that you don't want to do and you walk away from it but come back to it when you appreciate it," he says.

"It was the same with traditional Irish music. We were saturated with it when we were young. I was like, 'F**k this, lads. I want Guns N' Roses'. I went back eventually and appreciated what Irish music was all about. And sometimes you have to turn your back on something to say, 'You know that's actually very cool'."

Despite what certain slow-witted begrudgers might say about him -- stage Irish, fake Kerry fool, too full of himself -- Daithi O Se is actually very cool. And funny with it.

He was a teacher at CBS in Athy (as well as being on TG5 for about two years) before he got a full-time job at the Irish-language station in 2001. One day while taking the religion class, Daithi told the pupils it was against the law to drink under the age of 18. When they said they didn't give a s**t about the law, Daithi tried another tack: "It is not to stop you drinking, I explained, it is because your penis won't work properly if you drink before you're 18.

"Most of them stopped," he recalls now with a belly laugh. About 10 years later, Daithi met a couple of ex-pupils at Punchestown Races and they told him that he had frightened the s**t out of them and they hadn't drunk since.

Daithi, who started on The Daily Show with Claire Byrne in 2010, was 'discovered' on a ferry boat in Dingle, on which he was working in the summer of 1999, by someone who told him that TG4 was looking for people.

"I said I'd go for it and have a bit of craic. I never had any aspirations to be on TV.

"Being on the boat was a good time for me," he says sounding suddenly like Hemmingway on Guinness. "We slept on the island sometimes. But I loved the boat. I had no socks or shoes. The uniform was a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. I was out in the sun or the rain all day long. Everyone was happy. I was 22, I suppose."

His experience on the sea near his home of Dingle was in contrast to his education in the town.

"I hated school. I just didn't like being confined. I didn't like to be told to shut up. And if you keep talking you'll amount to nothing in your life. That kind of s**t." He wanted to leave after his Junior Cert but his mother persuaded him to stay on. "One of my huge regrets in life," he says now, "is that I didn't cop on and listen in

school. School doesn't suit everybody. But, it definitely didn't suit me. All I needed in school was a pat on the back and to be told I was doing good -- and I still do."

At RTE?

"Exactly. It's like meeting someone down the street who says 'I love your show'. Sometimes they say 'you're a pain in

the hole'. That's fine. You'll have 10 fellas who tell you the opposite. I always said the negative people, you know, God knows what kind of day they're after having. But I always say I'd rather be a third-rate broadcaster than a first-rate critic. That's my philosophy."

Growing up in the wilds of Kerry was, he says, very simple in one sense, but, he adds, "we had a huge amount of freedom, looking back now. We came home from school and we kicked football day long until it got dark."

His father, who is also a musician, has written about 20 books, Daithi says: "The first book he wrote about was his own life."

Asked if there are any parallels with his own life, Daithi smiles: "I suppose love for Irish music; and the love for the Irish language," he says, before adding wryly, "my father married when he was 18 -- I'll be 36 when I get married. He had five kids. I'd love to have five kids. I'll have to get to work straight away.

"We are both very keen to have children," he says of Rita. (They are getting married on July 12 in Dingle, with a bash in a hotel in Tralee after.) "I'd love to have five. She won't react well when she reads this on Sunday," he chuckles.

His father never spoke English to him, not even once. Daithi says he will be like that with his own children, but with a bit of the occasional English from both himself and Rita.

After Rita appeared on the Rose Of Tralee in the summer of 2008, they became friends on Facebook early the following year.

"Rita was someone I knew a lot before we started going out," he says. (He had gone out with another woman for two years prior to meeting lovely Rita. I don't talk about that," he says, "out of respect for that person and out of respect for the woman I'm going to marry. I'd rather not.")

"And then we were doing a show on TG4 down the East Coast and Rita and I met up for a few days in 2010," he says.

They spent a few days together in New York. It must have gone well because the RTE star flew home and then the following week flew over on the Friday to New York and left Sunday morning.

"I went over to her twice the following month too," he beams. " I was doing up the air miles."

Unluckily for Aer Lingus, Rita moved over to be with Daithi in Ireland in September of last year. Only a few months previously, on July 3, 2011, Daithi got down on one knee -- it is a long way down as he is six foot two inches -- and proposed to Rita in New Jersey, "looking out at Manhattan in the rain where I first told her I loved her."

Maybe he sang Lovely Rita to her that day too.

The Daily Show is on Monday to Friday on RTE One at 4.50pm