The great Ethiopian tells Ian O'Riordan why when he stops running on athletics tracks he may run for election

He walks slowly though the hotel door, appearing to finish a text message on his mobile phone. He looks cold - dressed in about six layers of clothes, including three tracksuit tops zipped up around his neck. And he's not smiling.

With the possible exception of his 18 world records and 10 major championship gold medals the thing Haile Gebrselassie is best known for is his great white toothy smile. They say it never deserts him. So maybe he's just tired from being dragged around Dublin for three days. Maybe he's just tired of wearing that smile, tired of being the most popular face of Ethiopia.

He takes a seat without making much eye contact. "I'm touched, so touched," he says, and starts gently punching his heart. It turns out he's just visited an exhibition of school projects on Ethiopia, part of this year's Trócaire Lenten campaign.

"Giving money is one thing, and that is great. But what those Irish students knew about Ethiopia, and what they had learnt, I was so touched. It was fantastic."

With that Gebrselassie raises his head and breaks into a smile. Over the next hour he'll only twice lose it again. Firstly, when asked if he still has the hunger to compete in world athletics - as if to say stupid question, of course he does. And secondly, when handed a bottle of Irish whiskey - as if to say that's too much, he doesn't deserve it.

There are so many incredible things about Gebrselassie, and the modesty with which he accepts them. Most have to do with his achievements in distance running. Only one European, for example, has run under 13 minutes for 5,000 metres. He's broken that barrier nine times.

He's not the best runner on the planet anymore, and agrees that honour now lies with his compatriot Kenenisa Bekele, and yet long after Gebrselassie's time is finally up they'll still be calling him the greatest.

But perhaps the most incredible thing about Gebrselassie is what he's achieved off the running track, and how much more he wants to achieve. He was born 32 years ago into nothing only a typically poor family in rural Ethiopia, but has always held a steadfast obligation to his roots.

He lives now in a comfortable house in the capital, Addis Ababa, with his wife and three daughters. He's undoubtedly one of the wealthiest men in Ethiopia, and determined to put it all back into his country.

"Of course, I have all the things I need," he says. "But what's important to me is what I have mentally, and the confidence in myself. I can sit down with people begging beside my car, or at the church, people in extreme poverty. I feel no different to them. That's one of the good things about Ethiopia, that if you are rich or poor it still doesn't matter. The people who live next to me, maybe 50 metres away, have nothing. I think that's so important. And you will always see people smiling. In the countryside where people have nothing they will smile.

"But I've travelled so much, all around the world, and I've seen how different things are in other countries. Like what I've seen here in Ireland. So when I go back home and see people with so much poverty, with nothing, I know I have to do something about it. A lot of people in Ethiopia think they have a nice life, because so few people have seen outside of it. But if I'm away from Ethiopia for a long time I can't believe what I see when I go home."

It quickly becomes evident that Gebrselassie is far more concerned about his country than about himself. When he first left Ethiopia in 1991 to compete in the World Cross Country he started at what he calls the university of life. He worked hard at mastering his English. He read books and newspapers at every opportunity. And then he went to work.

"For the last 15 years I've gained so much experience. I want to at least share that experience with Ethiopia. I remember about seven or eight years ago I came back from Japan, and thought why can't Ethiopia be like that? Or be like Europe? What is our problem? I was always questioning that. At first I just thought God gave a lot to Europe, and less to Africa. Of course, that was the wrong thinking.

"So I read a lot about other countries, like what happened after the second World War. That gave me the sense that no one becomes rich from nothing. It's not by sitting around and drinking beer. It's through hard work.

"Over the last two or three years we can see a lot of things happening in Ethiopia. Things like the roads and industry are improving fast. I've also heard about what Ireland was like 20 or 30 years ago. Everybody talks about that. Not so long ago this country was not doing as good.

"Even here in Dublin I looked at the kids and their school uniforms. I was so jealous. Why can't the Ethiopians have all that? We have uniforms, but not the shoes and the socks. When I go home I'll make sure we have that."

So at least two schools in Ethiopia will have better uniforms within weeks, the two Gebrselassie himself opened about five years ago. The students pay about $7 a month, but he covers all other expenses.

"One I built in the place where I was born," he explains. "The other a short distance from Addis. That was the first thing I wanted to do, because I believe education is so important. We have computers, languages, and we teach all ages. I started these schools, but I also want to finish with them some day, so that from then on the school can help itself. And I can move on to another one."

But he's not all about charity. He also founded a construction company, with the dual purpose of improving building standards in Addis Ababa and making money. Run by his brother, Assefa, with his wife, Alem, acting as deputy manager, it now employs about 200 people.

HIS OWN ambitions for his country - like his own running career - knows no limits. But for now he can only think about what he wants to do. He still has some unfinished business in the athletics world before he'll start fully tackling the business of the Third World.

"There is no border, when I say I'll stop running there. I still have big ambitions to run more, and of course the marathon in Beijing. To win that would be my plan. But right now I see two big problems with Ethiopia: Poverty and HIV. Those two things, we can't eradicate one without the other. They go together. We know that's going to be very hard. And we have to start with education.

"I don't know yet what is the best way for me to get involved with that. We'll see. It's not that I want to be a politician, but because I want to do something. If it means becoming a politician then yes I would do that. I know this is serious, a serious problem. But because of what I've seen in Europe and America it's very difficult for me, and so sad, to accept what I see in Ethiopia.

"It's not as easy for me as some people think. Popularity is not everything when it comes to elections. It's also about what party I'll be with it. And I know that's the only way to becoming president or prime minister. But I can see an end to the problems. I believe they can stop somewhere. I feel very positive about the future of Ethiopia, absolutely."

For now, though, he'll just help out in whatever way he can. Like supporting overseas aid agencies such as Trócaire. Gebrselassie has always found it hard to say no to anything, but when his old childhood friend Mesfin Tilahun came calling last December he thought he might have to. Tilahun works with the Trócaire office in Addis Ababa, and asked him if he'd come to Ireland to help launch the Lenten campaign. Gebrselassie realised he'd be in the middle of his training for last Sunday's London marathon, and asked if he could come close it instead.

As it happened, an old Achilles tendon injury forced him to withdraw from London. He visited Gerard Hartmann's clinic in Limerick yesterday to get another opinion on what the problem might be. It doesn't prevent him from running, it justprevents him from running as fast as he wants. He'll almost certainly run a marathon before the year is out, determined to improve on the two hours, six minutes and 35 seconds he ran when finishing third in London in 2002. Some people believe he is still the man to crack the two-hour barrier.

But he won't even try to win back his 5,000- and 10,000-metre world records, which Bekele broke in the space of nine days last June.

"Well, before I broke those records, they belonged to somebody else. So I knew from the beginning they would not always belong to me. I also had great problems with the Kenyans and the Moroccans, and had to break them many times. Like the 5,000 metres I broke four times. So the good thing now is that they still belong to Ethiopia.

"And you know I have to thank also the Irish guy." Who? Marcus O'Sullivan? "Yes, he paced me many times. He was my lucky athlete. The first record I broke in 1994 he was there. When I wanted a pacemaker he was always the first man. Even for my first 10,000 metres world record the first 2,000 metres was paced by O'Sullivan. I think he paced most of my records."

When asked, though, if anyone outside of Ethiopia can ever break those records he gives hope to everyone - as positive about other countries as about his homeland.

"Take Addis Ababa," he says. "No one there is running. The only athlete who has ever come from there was Millon Wolde. Nobody else, from 3.5 million people. All the rest come from rural areas.

"I really started to run because of Miruts Yifter. When he won the Olympic Games in 1980 I was seven or eight, and I wanted to become like him. But we don't get nearly as many new faces as Kenya. We need to develop more athletes, because even we don't have an endless supply.

"I know you have more computers here than Ethiopia, and a different lifestyle. But all you need for long-distance running is some natural talent. Anything is possible after that."