The weather on December 8, 1999 was in keeping with the maelstrom engulfing the Irish Catholic Church at the time over continuing clerical child sex abuse revelations.
Addressing 350 pilgrims in the Clare village of Newmarket on Fergus, he told them that the pilgrimage was a way of “recognising, acknowledging, painful though it may be, serious wrongs have been done, and deep hurts have been caused by people working with our church down the years”.
He said: “I have particularly in mind the scandals that have come to light in recent years related to the abuse of people in care… The pilgrimage is in some way an effort to express sorrow for the wrongs done or hurts caused and to ask for forgiveness in so far as people are ready to forgive.
"Sometimes hurts can be so deep that we find it almost impossible to forgive, so I hope at least that our pilgrimage would be some help towards a beginning towards forgiveness.”
One pilgrim from Newmarket said it was an honour to walk with the bishop. “He’s a lovely man and I’m just glad that I can come here and give him my support.”
At a time when the church was reeling from the clerical child sex abuse scandals, Bishop Walsh provided leadership and a humane response, both in his public words and in his own private meetings with survivors.
A native of Roscrea in Co Tipperary, Walsh spent his entire priesthood ministering in Ennis, in St Flannan’s College, in the Cathedral Parish, as Bishop of the Diocese of Killaloe and in retirement in recent years.
This month, Bishop Walsh celebrated 66 years as a priest.
In an illuminating piece in to mark his 90th birthday last month, Bishop Walsh told Joe O’Muircheartaigh that he first arrived in Ennis as a boarder at St Flannan’s College in 1947.
Walsh and his brother were due to go to secondary school in Roscrea, but their parents changed their minds and they were sent to St Flannan’s instead, after Walsh suspected that a member of the clergy intervened.
Boarding at St Flannan’s College was “tough going”, where facilities were poor and food rationing continued while there were a couple of teachers “who were very severe, who’d slap you in the face”.
Walsh sat his Leaving Certificate at St Flannan’s College in 1952 and was leaning towards studying engineering as he had a flair for maths and physics.
However, of the 54 or 55 boys in his class, more than 20 went to seminary the following September and Walsh was one of 550 students studying for the priesthood at Maynooth.
Bishop Walsh said: “The whole atmosphere of the country and so on was very religious. It was dominated by religion.”
He spent three years at Maynooth before he moved to the Irish College in Rome to complete his studies and was ordained here in 1959 before returning to Rome to complete his post-graduate studies.
In Rome, with 60 other College students, Walsh continued his life-long love affair with hurling where he played once a week on a soccer pitch the students would rent out.
He returned to Ireland and completed a H-Dip in Galway and returned to St Flannan’s College in 1963 to teach.
He spent 25 “very happy” years at the college teaching, which he regarded as a privilege.
“I would have been quite happy to continue teaching for the rest of my life,” he said.
He was appointed as administrator to Ennis parish in 1990 and four years later, was appointed as Bishop of Killaloe at a time when he continued to be immersed in GAA and was a selector for the Clare senior hurlers.
Very quickly after his appointment, Bishop Walsh had to deal with the child sex abuse scandals.
He said last month: “I thought the only way to handle it was to be open and honest about it… in the long run, it’s only doing further damage to the institution if you are not upfront.”
Bishop Walsh also made national headlines in 1998 when he ensured that the Christmas of seven young children would not be overshadowed by the threat of eviction by allowing a Traveller family to set up home on his Westbourne Palace grounds in Ennis.
Anxious to play down his generosity at the time, Bishop Walsh said: “There was a family in need and I responded to that need.”
He would repeat the act of making the grounds available to homeless Travellers a number of times during his time as bishop.
He was a liberal voice amongst the hierarchy on various issues. In a newspaper interview in 2005, he said priests should be allowed to get married if they wished and that it may happen in the future.
He said he believed there was “room for both priests who are married and celibate priests in our church”.
Bishop Walsh submitted his resignation to Pope Benedict XVI on reaching his 75th birthday in January 2010 and remained as Bishop of Killaloe until the appointment of Bishop Kieran O’Reilly on May 16, 2011.
Bishop Emeritus Walsh remained very active in the local community since, was a regular attendee at GAA games and was also an active member of a local choir in Ennis, Forever Young.
He had enjoyed good health apart from “a bad knockout I got in 2013”.
He continued to say mass every morning with retired nuns in Ennis, but did curtail some of his other mass duties over the past year due to a back problem.
Only last month he said mass to a packed St Peter and Paul Cathedral in Ennis to make his 90th birthday, where the love and affection the Clare public had for him was very apparent.
One of those in attendance was a St Flannan’s College past pupil of Bishop Walsh, Chris O’Donovan.
The Ennis man recalls: “Bishop Walsh gave the homily and said he was privileged to spend his whole pastoral life in Ennis. It was a humbling thank you from the altar and he got emotional thanking people.
“There was real sense in the church that this was going to be one of his last masses.
"He got a massive round of applause.
"It was a beautiful celebration of his life.
"There wasn’t a dry eye in the house and there was a real sense that we were coming to the end of something great.
"That’s what was beautiful about it.
"He was a great man.”