His father, Bill Walsh, married Ellen Maher in January 1926 and they had a family of four boys and two girls. The youngest, initially called William, was born on January 16, 1935. The children grew up in the townland of Glenbeha (Glen of the Beech), 5km from Roscrea, Co Tipperary.
The family farm was part of a large estate bought around 1925 by members of the local community.
Hardworking Bill sold milk from a horse-drawn float on a house-to-house basis, sometimes accompanied by his youngest child, who found it exciting.
Willie, as he came to be known, began his education aged four, attending the local Corville National School and moving on later to a boys’ school in Roscrea town where a teacher named Diarmuid Fitzgerald instilled in him a love of mathematics which, as an adult, Willie would teach, along with physics, for 25 years.
In September 1947, aged 12, Walsh and his older brother John became boarders at St Flannan’s, the diocesan secondary school in Ennis, Co Clare.
Later recalling his five years there, he wrote: “Discipline was severe — no question here of ‘spare the rod’.’’ But he added that most other boarding schools were equally strict at the time. On a more positive note, he acquired a keen and lifelong interest in hurling.
Tempted by a career in engineering, Willie opted eventually for the religious life and, although initially attracted by the African missions, chose the option of clerical student in his home diocese of Killaloe.
Aged 17, he became a seminarian at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, in September 1952, one of 20 classmates from St Flannan’s who took a similar path. There were almost 550 students in Maynooth at the time, all dressed in black with a white collar and studying for a BA or BSc degree.
After three years in Maynooth, Willie Walsh was sent to the Irish College in Rome to study theology. The architecture of the Eternal City and especially the sight of Pope Pius XII being carried aloft into St Peter’s Basilica proved awe-inspiring to the 20-year-old from rural Tipperary.
The Irish College had a holiday villa close to a Mediterranean beach and the young clerics took full advantage of that facility.
Two successive days are never the same
His ordination to the priesthood took place in Rome on February 21, 1959. Family members were in attendance and his parents received Fr Walsh’s first blessing at the Church of St Alphonsus Liguori.
He spent another three years in the Italian capital studying Catholic canon law, the rules and principles by which the Church is governed. It was a stirring time, with Pope John XXIII in the Vatican preparing the Second Vatican Council.
Returning to Ireland in the summer of 1962, Walsh acquired a Higher Diploma in Education at University College Galway (now University of Galway), which involved teaching practice at the Irish-language boarding school Coláiste Éinde. He then returned to his alma mater, St Flannan’s, where he taught for 25 happy years. He also coached young hurlers and became a selector for the Clare senior county team.
In 1988, at the age of 53, he was appointed as a curate in Ennis parish. It was quite a change from the fairly structured routine of a teacher to a life where, as he put it himself: “Two successive days are never the same.”
Having worked mainly with teenagers he was now involved with all age groups, although he enjoyed the reminiscences of older parishioners.
The joys of baptism and weddings were mingled with the sadness of marriage break-ups and deaths, especially suicides. However, he wrote that it was “also a real privilege to share in people’s suffering and to try to accompany them on the journey towards healing or at least just coping”.
In 1990 he was appointed administrator of Ennis parish which was followed in 1994 by becoming Bishop of Killaloe, a diocese stretching from Clare’s Atlantic coast to the foothills of the Slieve Bloom mountains in Co Laois.
It meant Walsh would have less time to follow his passion for hurling because, as one observer put it, he had moved “from camán to crozier”.
He developed a special concern for the Traveller community and the difficulties they faced in getting a location to park their caravans, which were sometimes impounded “even when there was no alternative place for them to go”.
As a result, he allowed 11 Traveller families to move onto the lawn in front of the bishop’s house, where they remained for about a year-and-a-half. The children had fun and games in a secure environment and a wedding reception took place in a marquee, with the bride and groom arriving in a white limousine.
He recalls in his 2016 memoir titled No Crusader that, during his 16 years as a bishop, “the single most painful and distressing reality” was to deal with almost 60 allegations of child sexual abuse by priests of the diocese.
He said: “Time and again I sat in my room and listened to survivors’ stories and to their pain and anger. On numerous occasions after such meetings I sat in my room alone and allowed the tears to flow.”
It was also distressing and painful to have to tell a priest colleague he must step aside from ministry because of an allegation “and more painful still to later tell him that his priesthood was ended”.
Concluding a chapter on this issue, he wrote “the Catholic Church in Ireland and worldwide must learn to be forever humbled by the tragedy and shame of clerical child sexual abuse”.
In more general terms, he suggested in a 2005 interview that the Catholic Church should lift the marriage ban for priests and predicted that this might come about at a future stage, stating that there was “room for both priests who are married and celibate priests in our church”.
Reaching the age of 75 in 2010 he submitted his resignation to Pope Benedict XVI but remained in post until May 16, 2011, when his successor, Bishop Kieran O’Reilly, was appointed.
He continued attending GAA matches and participating in a local Ennis choir with the interesting title of Forever Young. Marking his 90th birthday last January, he said mass at St Peter and Paul Cathedral in Ennis, delivering an emotional homily of gratitude to the large crowd in attendance.
He died unexpectedly but peacefully at home on February 19, predeceased by his three brothers and two sisters.
Current Bishop of Killaloe Fintan Monahan was a celebrant at the requiem mass in Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral in Ennis where a message from the Vatican stated: “His Holiness Pope Francis was saddened to learn of the death of Bishop Emeritus William Walsh and he sends his condolences to the clergy, to the religious and to the lay faithful of the Diocese of Killaloe, recalling with gratitude the kind and gentle way with which he carried out his many years of ministry.”