The president-elect of the Irish Farmers Association, John Dillon, made a spectacular entrance to the count centre at the luxurious CityWest Hotel on Tuesday.

Minutes before the triumphant declaration, Mr Dillon swept into the count centre, followed, and sometimes shouldered by, some of the hundreds of his supporters.

He showed little emotion as he made his acceptance speech, unlike his closest supporters, some of whom were shedding tears of joy and relief.

For the 53-year-old Dillon it was a long, hard road from the quiet acres in east Limerick to the panelled office of the IFA president in Bluebell, in south Co Dublin.

He had just completed a gruelling campaign for the top IFA job which had always eluded serving deputy presidents until, to use Dillon's own election slogan, "Dillon Delivered".

But who is John Dillon, the man who will be the most public face in farming for the next four years? Is he going to be the bin Laden of agriculture or just another farm leader who will read from the Bluebell hymn sheet?

The man who will take over the IFA was born in Pallasgreen, Co Limerick, into a farm which the Dillon family has held for over 300 years.

The young Dillon was always destined to take over the farm and build it up but that was a difficult task as the returns from farming were not great.

He will tell of a time when his elderly parents' pension was the only money coming into the farm.

Educated locally, he quickly became involved in farming politics through the young farmers' organisation Macra na Feirme.

For a time he was also involved in politics; his family were Fine Gael supporters but in later years, John Dillon became a PD supporter, even though he is no longer a member of any political party.

His other great passion was cross-country running, which he enjoyed because it was a tough sport for very focused people.

"Dillon used to get out in front early in the race and run as hard as he could to break the hearts of the opposition.

He used his physical strength to hold on to the lead and he often won that way," said one man who remembered his racing career.

He was also a keen supporter of the Co Limerick hurling team but, surprisingly, never played hurling at any serious level

He met his wife, Essie, through Macra na Feirme and they married 32 years ago.

In the intervening period they have had nine children, seven sons and two daughters.

Dillon has boasted that two of his sons are in full-time farming and he has a daughter married to a full-time farmer.

Not many years ago, he was broke to the point where he could barely afford to wake his sister-in-law.

He is fond of recalling the hard times in the 1980s when his sister-in-law died in an accident and he was down to his last £100 because of problems on the farm.

Three times the herd he was trying to build up was slaughtered because of outbreaks of brucellosis, leaving him and his wife and nine children without any income.

"You have to know pain to sympathise with those who are suffering. You have to be down to your last shilling before you understand," he says.

He had to get to understand the rest of the world too because the lack of money from farming forced him out into the workforce for a time when he worked in meat plants.

There he earned a living but developed a dislike for the kind of practices he saw in the processing industry which seemed to him to work against farmers and deprive them of their rightful share. This was to provide useful ammunition to him in his IFA career.

So too was the additional knowledge he garnered as an agricultural contractor which he turned to for a time in order to supplement the family income.

The president-elect almost boasts that neither he or his wife have taken a holiday in the past 30 years because they have been too busy "trying to survive".

That knowledge of hungry times stood to him in the last month when, despite tremendous opposition from three other candidates, Padraig Walshe, John Boylan and Raymond O'Malley, he managed to be elected by a 45-vote margin.

He had other opponents too. There are those in the formal IFA structure who believed that Dillon was not the right man to deliver the message from farming Ireland to an urban public feeling the pinch of an economy in decline.

That was a job, Dillon supporters say sarcastically, which was ably done by the outgoing president, Tom Parlon, who they dubbed "Silken Thomas".

"Tom was a great man to go on television and talk very well but he and the people who really run IFA from Bluebell literally had to be kicked into action by Dillon when the factories were depressing the price of beef back in 1999," said one close supporter.

"But times are changed now and farmers have to talk up for themselves. Dillon won't be afraid to call a spade a spade; the day of the agricultural implement is over," he said.

"John Dillon forced the beef blockade on IFA and made Tom Parlon the kind of folk hero he is today. He would have done damn all only for John," he added.

While Dillon's credentials as a militant are beyond question, what his opponents do charge is that the Limerick man is incapable of knowing when to strike a deal.

"Parlon and Michael Berkery the general secretary of IFA have had to carry out a large number of rescue operations over the last four years because Dillon does not know when to stop," said one highly-placed IFA source.

They claim that on a number of occasions, including the infamous sit-in at the EU Commission offices in Dublin, they had to negotiate his way out of an embarrassing situation.

Not so, say Dillon's supporters. The sit-in had delivered a decent deal for farmers from disadvantaged areas which no one else in the organisation was prepared to take on. His determination had forced the Taoiseach to make a deal with IFA far beyond its expectations.

There was some irony in the fact that last Thursday night the Taoiseach spent some 10 minutes on the phone congratulating Dillon on his victory and wishing him well.

He and the rest of the social partners will have to spend the next four years dealing with Dillon, whom his critics claim has a "voice like gravel being tipped from a lorry".

Even in the past four years, when Dillon has held the post of deputy president, he has been seen as an outsider, locked out of the system because he is not "a team player".

He was, for instance, not on the invitation list for the Clinton visit. The IFA head office said that the invitation limited them to the amount of people they could bring along.

And he placed himself outside the well-oiled machine which is the official IFA structure. Recently he publicly disagreed with the IFA settlement with the National Roads Authority which upset Irish taxpayers but seemed to have pleased most of the 8,000 farmers who will lose land to road development.

The support he received in the election, say his critics, indicate that he has split the organisation between the small and large farmers. His supporters counter that Dillon is on record as saying he will represent all IFA members. Even allowing for the fact that his three opponents were from Leinster and Ulster, Dillon has gained little support from the heartland of farming in the east of the country. His support came from the west and south. where the smaller farms are located.

The eastern-based members of IFA, many in the nine counties which did not vote for him, claim they have lost their franchise and Dillon, will not look after their affairs in the way they would like. There is already talk of a mid-term challenge in two years time.

There are certainly both internal and external challenges ahead for the Limerick man who has been known to drive up to 400 miles a day to meet business commitments.