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Ian Broad
Born: February 29th, 1944
Died: January 29th, 2021
Ian Broad, who has died aged 76, was an inspirational teacher with a wide range of interests outside the classroom. An idealist and a somewhat chaotic but effective force of nature, he pursued his passions with vigour, recruiting helpers to multiple causes, and firing them with a shared sense of mission.
He was an environmentalist and was fervent about the preservation of Dublin’s built heritage. He loved the Irish landscape and revelled in sharing its secrets with his pupils, introducing them to the outdoors, as well as to high-risk adventurous activities. He was a good host and was humorous (often in a self-deprecating way). Throughout his life he worked for the benefit of others, an ethic that was underpinned by his spirituality, which found expression in his embracing of the Quaker faith.
Broad was one of several students who occupied Georgian houses on the corner of Hume Street and St Stephen's Green threatened with demolition
Ian Frederick Broad was born in February 1944. His parents were Daniel Broad, a stock controller in CIE’s Inchicore works, and Violet Broad. The family lived in the Whitehall Road area of Kimmage and Ian attended St Mary’s National School in Crumlin.
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He went to Mountjoy School in Dublin city before graduating from Trinity College, Dublin, after which he began a career as a teacher, joining the staff of The High School in 1969. He taught geography and geology and began arranging field trips, a novelty at the time. Suddenly for pupils, textbook and diagrammatic descriptions of geomorphology, glaciation, rock formation and mountain building became real, and they learnt lifelong skills, such as how to read landscape.
Trips included visits to the Wicklow Mountains to gather minerals – Galena, pyrites and garnets – from the old mines area at the head of Glendalough valley. There were excursions to Achill to search for amethyst above Keem Bay and for fossils in Clare and Connemara. Teenagers experienced the edgy thrill of potholing in the Burren and in Fermanagh. He also introduced canoeing on the Dodder river and had pupils plant trees – another passion – in the school’s 30-acre grounds at Danum in Rathgar.
Broad’s passion for the preservation of Dublin’s built heritage emerged when, as a student in the late 1960s, he became involved in efforts, ultimately successful, to save Tailor’s Hall, now headquarters of An Taisce.
Around the same time he was one of several students who occupied Georgian houses on the corner of Hume Street and St Stephen’s Green threatened with demolition, hot on the heels of the destruction, by the ESB, of 16 Georgian houses on Fitzwilliam Street Lower.
In 1970, architecture student Duncan Stewart, a leader at Hume Street, Trinity student Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, and others established the Dublin Arts Festival and Broad was drawn in, chairing several subsequent festivals.
Apart from music, literature and the visual arts, themed annual events through the 1970s highlighted treasures within the Liberties, the Georgian north inner city and medieval Dublin, then popularly unappreciated. Broad, who was a keen photographer, had an eye for architectural detail, texture and incidental curiosities. He led walking tours that introduced Dubliners to gems all around them.
For one festival, Broad inveigled a friend from primary school, Michael O’Brien, into drawing buildings under threat of demolition.
“Dublin was falling down and there was huge corruption as well,” says O’Brien. “It wasn’t just Georgian buildings. It was Dublin in all its beauty being destroyed.”
O’Brien, then a printer, assembled his drawings into a portfolio which he printed. It sold well, prompting him to set up the O’Brien Press, for which he credits Broad.
At the 1976 festival highlighting Dublin’s fast disappearing medieval city, lectures by Pat Wallace of the National Museum and Dr Nuala Burke of UCD also proved influential.
“The Friends of Medieval Dublin grew out of that and led eventually to the Wood Quay protests,” recalls Bride Rosney, former presidential adviser and festival head after Broad. She said Broad’s key talent was spotting the potential in others and inspiring them to reach it.
“A lot of what he achieved was for individuals. He empowered others, saw their hidden strengths, and guided and inspired them to achieve,” she says. “I honestly think there wasn’t an individual he met who didn’t benefit from knowing him.”
Around 1980, Broad contracted meningitis and was paralysed for a time. The illness had a profound impact on him, prompting him to confront long suppressed questions about his sexuality.
Frightened that if he told anyone he was gay it would end his career as a teacher, he left Ireland for China where, under the auspices of the UN Development Programme (UNDP), he taught earth sciences and English at the Geological Institute in Changchun, Manchuria, and later at the College of Geology in Xi’an.
After about four years, he moved to Bhutan, the tiny Himalayan kingdom sandwiched between Bangladesh and Tibet. Teaching at the central school in Shengang, again within a UNDP programme, he was exposed to Buddhism, a belief system he found attractive.
However, finding the remoteness of the country difficult, in the mid-1980s he decamped to South Africa to teach in a New Era Schools Trust (NEST) school in Johannesburg. Set up by liberal-minded South Africans opposed to apartheid, Phuthing School was non-denominational and multi-racial. Broad joined the staff and later became director(similar in standing to deputy principal).
He returned to Ireland in the 1990s and taught for a time in Alexandra College.
In his latter years and often alone, he endured bouts of depression.
During the best of times, he liked nothing more than bringing together eclectic groups of people to share food and wine, conversation, ideas and laughter.
“He had an extraordinary capacity to make meaningful contact with interesting people,” according to long-time friend and former director of the National Youth Council, Michael Adams.
In a nod to his time in South Africa, Broad named his home in Dalkey Phuthing – meaning “a place of meeting” in Sotho – but by then, much of the laughter had gone out of his life. Some months before his death, he and O’Brien met again.
“The problem with my life,” he said, according to the publisher, “is that I never had a partner in the gay world.
“He said it as self-criticism, with deep regret and a hopeless lack of happiness.”
Living in sheltered accommodation, a fall put him in a nursing home where he became ill. He was admitted to St Vincent’s Hospital and, diagnosed with Covid-19, he died three days later.
Predeceased by his parents and siblings Robert and Heather, Ian Broad is survived by his sister Pamela Ford, his brothers Philip and Jack, and by hundreds of trees which he planted wherever he went, or gave to others as presents.