William A Watts:WILLIAM WATTS, who has died aged 79, was a former provost of Trinity College Dublin. He had previously served as dean of science and senior lecturer at Trinity, and was a former president of the Royal Irish Academy.
His colleague and former student Dr Daniel L Kelly described him as a “wonderful mentor and an inspiration to so many people”.
Another colleague, Prof Brian McMurry, said he was a pragmatist, albeit with vision. “He attracted and held immense loyalty from those who served with and under him.”
From a Protestant working-class background, he was born at Upper Mayor Street, East Wall, Dublin, in 1930, the youngest of three children of William Watts and his wife Bessie Dickinson. His father, a fitter-foreman at the Dublin dockyard, on being made redundant found employment with the Board of Works in Athy, Co Kildare.
A pupil of the Model School, Athy, he won a scholarship as a boarder to St Andrew’s College, then at Clyde Road, Ballsbridge. From there he won a scholarship to Trinity.
He read French and German and graduated with first-class honours in modern languages. A year later he took a first-class honours degree in natural sciences, having being mentored by the botanist David Webb and geologist Frank Mitchell.
At Trinity he played rugby, and was a useful prop forward. A member of the Fabian Society, he adhered to the socialist – as opposed to majority communist – wing.
After teaching at Hull University for two years in 1955 he was appointed a lecturer in botany at Trinity, and was made a college fellow in 1960. He served as professor of botany from 1965 to 1980, when he was appointed to the chair of quaternary ecology.
He became Trinity provost in September 1981. A group of students, including Joe Duffy and Alex White, who later made careers in RTÉ, labelled him an upholder of “the true Trinity traditions of aloofness and elitism”.
Unruffled, he got down to work. He first had to face a looming financial crisis. “This actually made it much easier for me to start thinking of ways we could make progress by ourselves, by using our resources imaginatively,” he said.
He believed Ireland should develop technologically advanced industries of which locally based research and development would be a major part, thereby creating a demand and opportunity for able young people who had previously been lost to emigration.
He saw “cautious expansionism” as the way forward for Trinity. He oversaw the most spectacular building programme since the 19th century. In a decade of austerity, he contrived to spend or allocate £17 million on the O’Reilly Institute, devoted to computer science, the Samuel Beckett theatre, student residences and an engineering block; student numbers rose by over 3,000.
“We are now big enough and good enough to hold our own internationally,” he said, as he completed his provostship.
After stepping down as provost in 1991 he resumed his career of research and writing. His research interests focused on the long climatic cycles of the quaternary period.
His presidency of RIA, from 1982 to 1985, coincided with the academy’s bicentenary and he ensured that everything was done to celebrate the occasion appropriately. And he was instrumental in persuading TK Whitaker to be his immediate successor.
Appointed the first chairman of the Health Research Board in 1986, he resigned three years later in protest at cuts in its budget by the Department of Health.
He was the first chairman of the Central Applications Office, and commissioned the points system.
A former secretary and chairman of An Taisce, he worked with the Office of Public Works in setting up national parks at Killarney, and Glenveagh, Co Donegal. His purchase of Mullaghmore on the Burren, originally for Trinity’s department of botany and later sold to the Government, was the basis for the Burren National Park. As chairman of the Fota Trust, he supervised the restoration of Fota House and gardens in Cork.
He was also a member of the National Board for Science and Technology and a board member of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.
Chairman of the central council of the Federated Dublin Voluntary Hospitals when the affiliated institutions were being consolidated into St James’s and Tallaght hospitals, more recently he was chairman of Dublin Dental Hospital.
He was a governor of the National Gallery and Marsh’s Library. For recreation he enjoyed travel, classical music and the Irish landscape, with special interests in wildlife and conservation. An avid stamp collector all his life, he assembled an extensive collection.
He published a memoir in 2008. In his introduction Prof Aidan Clarke described it as a “modern morality tale in which strong principles, common sense and a commitment to public service prevail, but only through the agency of prodigiously hard work”. He is survived by his wife Geraldine, sons Niall and Michael, and daughter Sheila.
William Arthur Watts: born May 26th, 1930; died April 26th, 2010