Tony Walsh’s abuse of one boy from 1978 to 1983 was so extreme that
he was sentenced this week to a total of 123 years. On Wednesday the
High Court is expected to release an unpublished Murphy report chapter
dealing with Walsh.
It contains shocking material.
THE EXTENT OF
Tony Walsh’s abuse of one young boy over the five years from 1978 to
1983, when the child, “David”, was aged between seven and 12, can be
gleaned from the sentences imposed by Judge Frank O’Donnell in the
Circuit Criminal Court last Monday: a total of 123 years.
Five of
the 13 counts, for buggery, attracted sentences of 10, 12, 14, 16 and 16
years each.
The remaining counts, for indecent assault, brought
sentences ranging from four to nine years.
As Walsh is to serve his
sentences concurrently, 16 years is the maximum time he will spend in
jail. It is the most severe sentence ever imposed on a clerical child
sex abuser in the State.
(Four years were suspended, as a psychologist’s
report said it was unlikely Walsh would offend again.)
With good
behaviour Walsh could be out of jail in 2019.
Fr Brendan Smyth,
probably Ireland’s most notorious clerical paedophile, was jailed for 12
years at the Circuit Criminal Court in July 1997. He died a month into
his sentence.
Another notorious abuser, the Donegal priest Fr Eugene
Greene, was released in 2008 after serving nine years of a 12-year
sentence.
But there were elements to the Walsh case that make it
stand out and that highlight the bravery and persistence of the now
38-year-old man who pursued it for 17 years, since he first went to the
Garda, in 1993.
Walsh spent eight years trying to stop his trial,
exhausting the judicial-review process. He failed. He had failed also in
another case in 1997. Then, after a round-the-houses judicial review,
also under free legal aid, he pleaded guilty and served time.
In
David’s case Walsh did not plead guilty and forced a trial. The jury
last month found him guilty, unanimously and after just 94 minutes, on
the 13 counts.
The speed of the conviction was down to David himself,
who, as Justice O’Donnell said on Monday, had been “an absolute
stalwart” in his evidence to the court.
David’s victim-impact
statement, prepared by the psychiatrist Prof Ivor Browne, includes the
details of three shocking incidents. One took place in “a small tunnel”
at the Phoenix Park, “towards the Furry Glen”, where there was “a small
cream mattress”.
David was raped there by Walsh. The boy “felt severe
pain and cried a lot”.
Afterwards Walsh wiped him with “a purple
sash (stole) he had with him”.
When Walsh picked up his jacket “a small
receptacle for holding Holy Communion wafers fell out of his pocket”.
He
brought David back to the presbytery, “put on Elvis records . . . and
gave him a glass of Coke”.
He then showed David “a Bible with pictures
of hell and said if he told anyone he would burn in hell and never go to
heaven and then he let him go home”.
Two of the original counts
in the trial related to that incident, but Judge O’Donnell directed the
jury to find Walsh not guilty of either, as David had given differing
dates for it between his two statements to the Garda and what he
insisted was the correct date in his evidence to the court.
Another
cruel incident, in which Walsh raped the boy, whose wrists were tied to
his ankles, as he lay over a coffee table at the presbytery, led to one
of the 16-year sentences.
On that occasion David was “crying loudly”
and “hysterical”. Walsh, who had turned up the music to drown out the
boy’s cries, took “about an hour to calm me down. I then went home”.
The
third incident occurred on a holiday in the summer of 1982 in
Inniscrone, Co Sligo. About 50 altar boys, including David, and many
other children from the Ballyfermot parish choir were there.
They were
accompanied by Walsh and three other priests, including Fr Michael
Cleary, then also serving in Ballyfermot parish and sharing a presbytery
with Walsh.
Walsh took David for a walk in the sand dunes, where he
raped him.
The sand caused David to bleed, so Walsh brought the crying
child down to the sea, to wash the blood off.
The saltwater stung the
child’s wounds, as David told The Irish Times when recounting this
episode some years ago.
Again, he was “crying a lot”, and Walsh had to
calm him down before he rejoined the others.
These were not
isolated incidents.
As Prof Browne said in the victim-impact report,
they were described in detail “because they were particularly heinous”.
But, he continued, “it should be stressed that over the five years,
between the ages of seven and 12, that this abuse continued, David was
raped anally and buggered by the priest on average a couple of times a
week.”
When David told his uncle what Walsh had been doing to him, his
uncle also raped him “on a couple of occasions”.
It was partially
thanks to Esther Rantzen that David’s abuse ended, he told The Irish
Times.
Coming up to his confirmation, he was at home watching TV with
his mother.
Rantzen was presenting an item about child sex abuse, and
David began to cry.
His mother asked what was wrong.
He told her an
edited version of what had been happening to him.
She went to the
presbytery, accompanied by David’s aunt.
Phyllis Hamilton, later
revealed as Fr Michael Cleary’s partner, answered the door.
She denied
Walsh was inside.
The women insisted he must be in, as his car was there
and they thought they had seen him at a window.
Hamilton went inside,
and Walsh came to the door.
He denied everything.
As Prof Browne puts it
in the victim-impact report, “then knowing the game was up, Walsh
stopped abusing David altogether and terminated their relationship”.
Despite
his awful experiences and equally awful history since the abuse ended,
David, according to Prof Browne, remains “a highly intelligent and
capable person”.
Judge O’Donnell also recognised this in his comment
last Monday and, again, in an observation he made about David’s
intelligence and articulacy during one of many jury absences that
Walsh’s counsel instigated.
A priest who had been part of The All
Priests Show with Walsh in the 1970s and 1980s told The Irish Times that
revelations about his former colleague had come as “the biggest shock”.
Walsh became part of the show in the late 1970s, when his Elvis Presley
impersonation act was “very popular”, the priest said.
“Instead of
joining the rest of us backstage afterwards, he’d usually be with kids
in the front row. Parents thought he was great. It’s shocking how
ignorant we all were about the whole catastrophe.”
High expectations: What is Chapter 19?
There is a general expectation that the High Court will publish the 29-page chapter 19 of the Murphy report next Wednesday.
Most
of the report was published on November 26th last year.
It detailed
findings of the Murphy Commission following its investigation of the
handling by Catholic Church and State authorities of clerical child sex
abuse allegations in the Dublin archdiocese, made between 1975 and 2004
and involving a sample of 46 priests.
Two chapters, 19 and 20,
were withheld, as court proceedings were pending against two men who
were the subject of each. That remains the case where chapter 20 is
concerned.
With the jailing of Tony Walsh last Monday, however, the way
now seems clear for publication of chapter 19, and of 21 other
references to Walsh in the Murphy report.
“David” has spoken to the
commission about his abuse by Walsh.
It is also known from the
report itself that it investigated the church tribunal in Dublin that
found in 1992 that Walsh should be laicised on foot of allegations of
child sex abuse.
It states that “only two canonical trials took
place over the 30-year period [investigated].
Both were at the
instigation of [then] Archbishop Connell and the Commission gives him
credit for initiating the two penal processes which led to the dismissal
of Fr Bill Carney in 1990”.
The report also says: “Archbishop
Connell was one of the first bishops in the world to initiate canonical
trials in the modern era. He did so in relation to . . . Fr Bill Carney
in 1990.”
The blank in the report indicates the missing name of Tony
Walsh.
Sitting on the tribunal that laicised Walsh in 1992 were
three canon lawyers: the recently retired bishop of Killaloe, Willie
Walsh; the current Bishop of Dromore, John McAreavey; and Fr Paddy
Corcoran.
Bishop Willie Walsh has said he understood at the time that
the archdiocese had told the Garda about the tribunal findings.
It had
not.
Neither did McAreavey, Corcoran or Bishop Éamonn Walsh, who was
aware of the tribunal and its findings at the time.
Tony Walsh
appealed the tribunal decision to Rome, and the ensuing process took a
further three years.
In 1994, as that appeal progressed, Walsh sexually
assaulted the 11-year-old grandson of a man whose funeral he attended
dressed as a priest.
The boy’s parents contacted the Garda. Walsh
received a one-year jail sentence for the offence in 1995.
By then
Rome had commuted Walsh’s laicisation.
He would remain a priest but
spend a decade in a monastery.
When Walsh was convicted in the courts
Archbishop Desmond Connell flew to Rome and insisted that Walsh be
laicised.
He was.
SIC: IT/IE