IS TREVOR Sargent TD the most impeccable young man in the world? Does any other public representative look as tidy, as crisp, as efficient as he does, whisking up and down the paths of a North Dublin housing estate in his suit on a mild and lazy Saturday afternoon?
A woman answers the door and without looking thrusts a `Congratulations' card and a tenner at him. "Oh - you're not the First Communion boy," she laughs when she sees who it is.
This is a place for the rearing of children. They're everywhere. Trevor Sargent's conversations with their parents at the porches are punctuated by the unending, absent minded dialogue with this parallel world.
"Ask your Daddy if you want to go to the toilet." "Yes, pet, you'll be getting a Communion soon." "Tell your brother I said to give you a go with the ball".
At the very first house Trevor has happened on a real fan. "I'm delighted to see you," the man has said. "I'm very interested in environmental economics. In fact I'd like to talk to you about the implications of the abolition of university fees . . ."The two men, politician and citizen, are away on the only informed Green conversation of the afternoon canvass. Down at knee level a very small citizen in Postman Pat slippers has something urgent to say. "Our dog is called Blondie," he wants noted.
Years ago, when Trevor Sargent was going from door to door for the Green Alliance, as it then was, a child called back to his mother: "It's the Green Lions for you. These days, most people know who he is. "Aren't you off the television?" a woman inquires. That is enough to start her off on the iniquity of the water charges.
Ordinary decent people have been made into criminals just for not paying them "when look at everyone else - getting away with murder".
Trevor Sargent conscientiously develops the subject: the Green Party, after all, believes that water consumption above a fixed free amount should be charged for. This is one of the intrinsic problems on a Green canvass. Green policies need careful explaining. They also ask for self sacrifice now for the sake of a better future.
But though homes like those he was visiting are primarily shelters of the small, the women in jeans and fluffy mules who come to the doors, and their heavy, amiable husbands, are primarily guardians of the future. Yet they live in a warmly here and now world.
The things they want to talk to Trevor Sargent about the terrible bus service, the terrible traffic, the danger to children of cars taking short cuts, the way the Roads Department has killed the grass verges with herbicide because it can't be bothered maintaining the grass - are Greenish issues. But what the people want done about them isn't necessarily Green. They want more roads and more parking for private cars as well as a much better bus service, and the lady who wants the grass back wants it because it conceals the crisp packets and ice cream wrappers that accumulate beside the road.
Trevor Sargent shoots in to the local supermarket to get bananas and sandwiches for the canvassers' alfresco lunch. Does the girl at the checkout and her friend who does the packing ever get anyone who refuses plastic bags?
They look altogether blank.
"Well if they'd a lot of stuff they might ask for a box," they offer.
People are glad to see a TD. It's been too long since there was an election. The ordinary person needs help in dealing with the State. One group of neighbours has been trying for 14 months to meet County Council engineers about the traffic generated by an informal entry to a big school. One lady has to get a bus an hour early to go to bowling in Drumcondra: the bus from her part of Swords takes ages to get to town because it goes through the airport, "and the visitors get on and they haven't the right money and they don't know where they're going". She needs someone to talk to Dublin Bus.
As it happens, Trevor Sargent and his people talked to Dublin Bus only the day before, and know all about the problem. Indeed, Trevor Sargent had to leave the meeting with Dublin Bus early to get to his next appointment because he travels by Dublin Bus. Does any other TD know public transport from the user's point of view?
One man urges him into the kitchen of his house. Passionately, he shoves a suitcase full of medicine at him. "Try carrying that," he says to the politician.
This is the medicine his young son, who has cystic fibrosis, needs for just a fortnight. The medicine has to be refrigerated. The boy has to be given therapy on a bed. So this loving father has converted a van to hold a little fridge and a sort of bed, and the oxygen tanks the boy will soon need, so that he can sometimes go, maybe, to the beach.
But the bureaucrats at the Department of the Environment won't exempt the van from taxation because, going by the book, the boy is not disabled in the sense that he has arms and legs.
"I have to pay commercial tax on the van. £700 a year! How do they mean, he's not disabled, when he can't leave the house?"
When Trevor Sargent hacks out of that house, the woman next door wants to talk about getting a word put in about a sub post office appointment.... A pert young fellow in Man United gear goes past on a bike. "Don't go near number 40," he warns. "He'll bounce you all over the kitchen!"
But apart from him, and a woman who took the copy of Green News from a canvasser the day before and wrung it like you'd wring a neck, everyone is willing and even anxious to talk to Trevor Sargent.
"I'd say you'll be all right," a woman says to him comfortingly. "The young know how to vote nowadays.
And really, as Trevor Sargent and his equally young and dedicated helpers go up and down the roads, making notes of the citizens' concerns, leaving the literature and the number of the office a one TD party can barely afford, you can't but hope that she's right.
They're doing this, not for personal power, but so that the whole Green philosophy will some day be listened to. The fact that most people would a thousand times prefer that Middlesbrough would effing score than hear the first thing about Green philosophy makes them a bit improbable. But it makes them impressive, too.