IT IS probably appropriate that, along with the President and the Taoiseach, it will be Willie O'Dea that will take centre stage at today's 1916 celebrations.

The current cabinet is not short of political bruisers - step forward Michael McDowell, John O'Donoghue, Dermot Ahern and Brian Cowen - but when it comes to close-quarters combat, the Minister for Defence has few equals. The brilliant post-war chancellor of West Germany, Konrad Adenaüer, once said that the art of politics consists of knowing precisely when it is necessary to hit an opponent slightly below the belt, and it is a skill that O'Dea certainly does not lack.

The list of spats is a long one. During a row with Fine Gael's John Deasy in the Dáil chamber a couple of years ago, O'Dea remarked: "Perhaps he will get his girlfriend to interview him again on RT�?3 [sic]" - a reference to Deasy's then fiance (now wife) Maura Derrane. As TV3's crime correspondent, Derrane had interviewed Deasy, in his role as Fine Gael's justice spokesman, alongside justice minister Michael McDowell. O'Dea later apologised for the remarks.

More usually though, it has been the Labour Party - which he once accused of raising "hypocrisy to the level of a crusade" - that has been the target for his flak. His description of Ruairí Quinn as "Mr Angry from Sandymount" was one of the sharpest political jibes of recent years.

Quinn's successor, Pat Rabbitte, also got the full O'Dea treatment late last year.

"Some day, " the defence minister said, "Pat Rabbitte will drown in his own pomposity. The fact is that Pat Rabbitte is a man that approaches every subject with an open mouth. He seems to be permanently in awe of his own cleverness."

O'Dea once accused the then Labour Party advisor and long-time disability campaigner Fergus Finlay - who had criticised the government's proposed Disability Bill - of using people with disabilities as "a political football". Finlay described the comments as "unworthy".

To be fair, while he may sometimes play the man rather than the ball, the defence minister can hardly be accused of being overly defensive. He can certainly dish it out, but he can also take stick - and a fair amount of it is more than slightly below the belt. As a panellist on RT�?'s Questions and Answers last month, O'Dea was forced to listen as presenter John Bowman read out a viewer's comment that "Minister O'Dea should go to the Off the Rails programme, the makeover show, and get rid of his 1950s image". One can only imagine the reaction if a similar assessment was made about a female politician, but O'Dea, completely unfazed, was the one laughing loudest.

In the same week, the popular Today FM presenter Ray D'Arcy, while generally praising him as a "bright guy" with a social conscience, told listeners that O'Dea was like a "cross between Charlie Chaplin and Groucho Marx", adding: "If he walked onto a stage, he wouldn't have to say anything, you'd just laugh at him".

But those who have worked closely with O'Dea take him deadly seriously.

"Highly intelligent", "extremely competent", a "phenomenal worker" and a "politician who doesn't mind getting his hands dirty" by going on the public airwaves to defend the indefensible, are just a selection of plaudits from Fianna Fáil sources.

His work ethic is the stuff of legend.

While the stories of him canvassing on Christmas Day are surely apocryphal, the fact that they exist at all is telling. The joke in Limerick is that in other constituencies you get Mormons regularly calling to the door, but in the Treaty City, it is always Willie O'Dea. "If the traffic is going one way, Willie will make sure he's going the other way, making sure he'd be seen, " says one source.

And it pays off. He got one of the highest votes in the country in the last general election with one-and-a-half quotas, and there are already predictions that he will get in the region of 14,000-15,000 votes next year - making him the country's number-one vote getter. Independent councillor John Gilligan says that O'Dea gets votes from every part of the city. "Willie goes into places where others wouldn't go, " he says, adding that O'Dea works "24 hours a day, seven days a week".

Probably, the only politician in the country who matches that work rate and utter obsession with politics is the man he will be standing alongside today, Bertie Ahern. Although they are not thought to be particularly close, the two politicians have a lot in common.

Born in the early 1950s, both have developed formidable local organisations and completely dominated their respective constituencies, showing a marked reluctance to help out their running mates.

Both men speak with the unaffected accents of their native cities and have, at times, had to endure harsh comments about their appearance. The oft-repeated line that nobody really knows Bertie Ahern is also regularly used in respect of O'Dea, who is described as extremely private. "He's a very complicated guy.

Nobody knows him well. He's different, " says one close observer.

"I don't think anybody really knows him, " says a Fianna Fáil source. "You meet him in the Dáil and he'll smile and be friendly. And if he's around, he's up for the crack and is a good man for the banter. But he's never in the bar or the restaurant [in the Dáil]".

But, while Bertie Ahern's rise in national politics was meteoric, O'Dea's has been much more pedestrian. From a farming background in the east of the county, O'Dea was a lecturer in NIHE Limerick (now University of Limerick) when he was approached to run in the 1981 election. He failed to win a seat, but made it to the Dáil a year later and has been there ever since. He spent his first decade in the political wilderness because of his hostility to Charlie Haughey.

In 1988, he was expelled from the parliamentary party for voting against the government on the closure of Barrington's Hospital in Limerick. He was finally made a junior minister by Albert Reynolds in 1992, but, despite his growing dominance in Limerick, the wait for Cabinet recognition was a very frustrating one.

While his national profile was boosted by regular and extremely well-written contributions to the Sunday Independent, the perception of a 'mé féiner' overly focused on his constituency, was not helped when, in 2002, he exhorted Limerick taxi drivers to hang tough in the face of his own government's deregulation of the industry - neither the Taoiseach nor Tánaiste Mary Harney was amused.

Despite this setback, his elevation seemed assured in 2002 after the government was returned, but a last-minute change of mind by Ahern saw Michael Smith and Joe Walsh retained and O'Dea and Mary Hanafin losing out.

O'Dea's patience was wearing thin and he expressed his bitter disappointment, saying he was "absolutely gutted and sick to the stomach". However, he didn't sulk or cause trouble and his reward came two years later when he was appointed Minister of Defence during a Cabinet reshuffle.

The cheshire-cat grin he wore that night in the Dáil spoke volumes about what it meant to him. Since then, he has performed solidly and competently, and, while he has not lost any of the terrier instinct, he has largely avoided controversy - aside from the ludicrously overblown ?Willie the kid' moment when he allowed himself to be photographed pointing a gun at a camerman.

Now the dominant political figure in the midwest, O'Dea can look forward to being part of Fianna Fáil cabinets for the next 10 years if he wishes. After taking 22 years to land what Pee Flynn dubbed the 'Car with the Star', he is unlikely to be going anywhere soon.

C.V.

Born: November, 1952, in Limerick
Education: Patrician Brothers College, Ballyfin, Co Laois; UCD; Kings Inns and the Institute of Certified Accountants
Married: To Geraldine
In the news: As the Minister for Defence, he will be a central figure in today's 1916 commemoration