EANNA O BROIN, gifted teacher, sculptor and painter, died in a car accident at only 43. His life was tragically short, but full. His talents were numerous, his generosity of spirit boundless.
Eanna spent four years studying architecture before abandoning it; he did not, as he saw it, want to design concrete pillboxes for an Orwellian future. He arrived in UCD in the early 1970s, a particularly exciting period, where he took a BA degree and threw himself into the world of drama, being active in both An Cumann Dramaiochta and Dramsoc. He displayed an anarchic and inventive talent and a truly creative mind, and made many lifelong friends.
He was an artist, sculptor and painter, taking a further degree in fine arts at the NCAD before travelling to Spain to study sculpture for a year. He was also an author, linguist and traveller. He spent three years in Ecuador as a volunteer aid worker and travelled in North and South America and Europe. While he wrote the standard text book for mechanical drawing in Ireland, his first book was written for prisoners in Quito jail.
Eanna became a gifted and titterly dedicated teacher, in Dublin and later at Good Counsel College in New Ross, a part of Ireland he had come to love. He was involved with Slogadh, with musical societies, with choirs; he did set designs and posters; he designed kites with schoolchildren and, on occasions, appeared in front of the footlights himself.
He was always his own person; intense, imaginative, multi talented, driven, droll, absolutely upright, against the system - any system. This could sometimes be rather wearing: faced with a simple and a complicated option, he often managed to make the complicated one worse. But the offbeat humour - a trademark of his warm and close knit family - shone out. Although an individualist, he always distinguished between the system and those who were condemned, as he saw it, to operate it. Above all, he had extraordinary empathy and a gift deep friendship.
Eanna was his own harshest critic a perfectionist. His marriage to Alicia was probably the only thing he ever did with which he was really happy. Married only nine months, they had a nine month honey moon.
He is sorely missed by all who knew and loved him.