HE has trekked the Andes, been arrested during a Sellafield protest, caused ructions by waving a property developer's unsolicited cheque at one of his first council meetings, and proposed to his wife in a horse-drawn carriage on Merrion Square ten days after their first meeting.

He is Trevor Sargent, inaugural leader of the Green Party and popularly regarded as the Daniel O'Donnell of Leinster House. Until Friday last, he could have been the next t�naiste.

'Clever Trevor', as Phoenixmagazine dubs him, was waiting beside the phone last week for history to call him to the top of the class. His party colleague, John Gormley, once fondly described him as born prefect, though others favour the blunt characterisation of "dull as dishwater".

The trademark sludge-green suits may have gone the way of Bertie's old anorak, and the muesli and sandals may have been consigned to the closet of clich�s, but Sargent's Balbriggan garden in north Dublin is said to be a temple to his ideologically green fingers.

For a radical, he can be yawninducingly conventional, gripe his critics. During the election campaign, he confirmed in a Hot Press interview that the closest he has come to smoking pot was as a passive inhaler in the Buttery while a student at Trinity College, and that he is inspired by God in his political career.

A member of the Church of Ireland, he reads the Bible every day and was one of the founding members in the 1990s of an Oireachtas prayer group, along with the late Se�n Doherty, which was sometimes attended by the DUP's Reverend Martin Smyth.

Asked to describe his leadership style, a party member replied:

"We've nothing to compare him with because we never had a leader before. Ask me again in 10 years' time."

Born in 1960 to Mildred and Harry Sargent of Templeogue in south Dublin, he remembers his childhood as a "safe and happy" one. He went to the national school in Rathfarnham and then to the High School in Rathgar before starting a teaching degree at the young age of 16.

A second-hand copy of Small is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered, by Fritz Schumacher, which he unearthed in a shop in Rathmines, proved a life-defining read.

He joined the Green Party in 1982, the year after it was founded, and won a Dublin council seat in 1991. When he produced a developer's cheque in the chamber, in the course of a harangue against businessmen's inducements to councillors, other members scrambled to snatch it from him.

"I was surrounded from behind and I felt this arm going around my neck, pulling me back in the chair, and hands reaching out grappling like claws from JCBs, saying 'Grab the cheque. Somebody grab the cheque, ' which I held onto very tightly, " he graphically recalled.

"All I can imagine now is that there was a cold chill running up the spines of certain councillors in that room wondering was it Frank Dunlop's name on the bottom of the cheque."

His antipathy to developers had underpinned some of his more dogged contributions to D�il debate, winning little more than bored sighs from the Fianna F�il benches. On that party's brownenvelope history, he charged: "The ghosts of the past are catching up with Bertie Ahern, given that he was around at the same time as Charlie Haughey and Ray Burke."

His life has not been without tragedy. His younger sister, Cheryl, died of lung cancer at the age of 18.

Sargent had been teaching at the Model School in Dunmanway and living in Ballingeary in the west Cork gaeltacht (he is one of the best Irish speakers in the D�il) but moved back to Dublin to be close to his family.

After a whirlwind romance, he married former science teacher Heidi Bedell, who was elected a town commissioner for Malahide in 2004 and is now manager of Sonairte Ecology Centre, a registered charity in Balbriggan.

When the Greens finally conceded the futility of their policy of not electing a leader to safeguard the democracy of grassroots expression, they chose Trevor Sargent to take the helm in 2001.

Speaking on RTE's Drivetime last Thursday the party's first TD, Roger Garland, explained that rather than viewing themselves in terms of Left and Right, the Greens classify their ideological spectrum as 'Realos' (the realpolitik pragmatists) and 'Fundies' (fundamentalists). According to one leading Green, Trevor Sargent is "undoubtedly a Fundie".