A sort of homecoming as Trevor Sargent made rector at church close to Leinster House

It will be a sort of homecoming for Trevor Sargent in December when he takes up a new job just a few hundred metres from his old place of work at Leinster House. The former Green Party leader traversed that Dublin city centre walk many times: down Molesworth Street, left on Dawson Street and around the corner to St Ann’s Church.During his decades in politics, the church was a refuge from Dáil Éireann, “a special place of sanctuary, prayer and worship for me, for almost 30 years”, he said this week. He frequently attended lunchtime Holy Communion services there during his time as a TD.The church is a short hop from the parliament where he represented Dublin North as TD for 19 years, led the Greens for almost six years and served as junior minister for three.READ MOREOn December 6th next, Canon Sargent, as he is known now, will be installed as rector at St Ann’s by Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin Michael Jackson, completing something of a surprise circle for the politician-turned-ordained priest. He was ordained at Waterford Cathedral in 2018 and remembered how after the ceremony then bishop of Cashel Michael Burrows, who presided, said to him: “The difference now is that you won’t have to be elected every five years.” For Sargent, becoming a Church of Ireland priest “was always on the cards” from his time in secondary school in High School in Rathgar, south Dublin.Before politics, Sargent, who is from Templeogue in south Dublin, was heavily involved in north Dublin’s Balbriggan parish, where he was principal at St George’s national school. Then he was elected to Dublin Co Council in 1991 and to the Dáil in 1992. When he lost his Dublin North seat in the 2011 general election it was a case of back to the future. He returned to his spiritual roots, leading him to the Church of Ireland Theological Institute in Dublin where he trained for the full-time ministry.He was based at the Waterford Union of parishes for a few years before being appointed rector at Bunclody in Co Wexford in 2021 during the Covid pandemic. Speaking to The Irish Times this week, and with Drumcree back in the news again as Orangemen seek to march down nearby Garvaghy Road, he remembered being there in July 1997, the last time an Orange march was allowed to walk down the Garvaghy Road.Sargent, there as an observer, remembered staying in a house on the road and deciding to attend the Sunday service at the Church of Ascension on Drumcree Hill where Orangemen were also in attendance ahead of their march down the road.“As I walked up the hill to the church through what was left after rioting the night before, passing a group in Rangers jerseys, I felt like Clint Eastwood in a bad movie. The security forces thought I was mad,” he says. Arriving at the church, the then rector at Drumcree, Rev John Pickering, advised him to “sit with the journalists – that’s the safest bet”. He recalled telling the journalists that as “an Irish-speaking Protestant, I’m disliked by everyone”.In December, he will be moving to a more welcoming St Ann’s.His plans include continuing the church’s Black Santa sit-out fundraising tradition in the run-up to Christmas. St Ann’s, he feels, is “ideally placed as a city centre church”. Alongside “the Catholic churches on Haddington Road and Clarendon St, the Lutheran Church on Adelaide Road and with the new Dean of Christ Church Cathedral, Tom O’Brien, there is great potential to work together”, he says.