OPINION: Four more years in jail for the notorious 'singing priest'

Readers should note that this article contains details which many will find upsetting.

LAST week in Dublin notorious former 'singing priest' Tony Walsh (68) was sentenced to another four years in prison for indecent assaults of three schoolboys in the 1980s. Judge Martin Nolan of the Circuit Criminal Court described the crimes of Tony Walsh, who was defrocked in 1992 and formally dismissed from the priesthood in 1996, as “evil”.

Walsh has spent about 20 years in prison since 1995 when he was first convicted of indecent assault involving a child.

Few cases illustrate so well why the Catholic Church has deserved criticism for its handling of clerical child sex abuse as that of survivor Darren McGavin and perpetrator Tony Walsh. At the time Walsh shared the presbytery in Ballyfermot with Fr Michael Cleary and his 'housekeeper' Phyllis Hamilton.

Walsh’s abuse of Darren took place in Ballyfermot from 1978 to 1983 (from when Darren was six) and was so extreme that he was sentenced in December 2010 to a total of 123 years’ imprisonment, (if taken consecutively).

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 was to serve his sentences concurrently, 16 years was the maximum time he would spend in jail for those crimes. Four years were suspended as a psychologist’s report said it was unlikely he would offend again.

It was the most severe sentence imposed on a clerical child sex abuser in the Republic.

The Murphy Commission, which investigated the handling of clerical child abuse allegations in Dublin’s Catholic archdiocese between 1975 and 2004, described Walsh as “the most notorious child sexual abuser” to come to its attention. “It is likely that he has abused hundreds of children.”

It found that the archdiocese did not report child sexual abuse allegations against Walsh to the Garda for 17 years after it first received such complaints about him. It also revealed that in 1989 it had been suggested in the archdiocese that Walsh, then an admitted (to the archdiocese) child sex abuser, be appointed to the Church’s regional marriage tribunal, which deals mainly with annulments. This was not done, but two other child abuser priests were already on the tribunal.

In May 1988 Walsh admitted to the Dublin archdiocesean authorities that over the years he had been in Ballyfermot “he was involved with boys about once a fortnight”. That was 10 years after the first complaint about him was made to those authorities.

Walsh was sent to a treatment centre in England and returned to Dublin in November 1988 where he was appointed chaplain at a hospital for older people. He signed a contract of good behaviour with the archdiocese and nominated Fr Michael Cleary (yes, that Fr Cleary!) as his spiritual director.

In August 1989, there were further complaints about Walsh and children and he was returned to the treatment centre in England. In April 1990 then Archbishop of Dublin Desmond Connell removed Walsh from public ministry and gave him weeks to decide on either dismissal from the priesthood or voluntary laicisation.

By March 1991 there were further reports of Walsh’s and children. Then in August 1991, and for the very first time, a parent complained to gardaí about Walsh’s attempt to pick up her son. It helped put the skids under the Church.

In August 1993 a church tribunal in Dublin decided Walsh should be defrocked. He appealed this to Rome and while the appeal was in train he abused a boy at the child’s grandfather’s funeral in west Dublin. The boy’s mother contacted gardaí, alleging Walsh had also abused her son a year earlier. In late 1994 there were media reports about this case.

Early in 1995 Walsh admitted to gardaí that he had abused two boys in the 1980s. He was charged in connection with his abuse of the boy at the funeral in 1994 and sentenced to 12 months. It was the first of many such sentences.

Meanwhile, and inexplicably, Rome rejected Walsh’s laicisation as recommended by the Dublin tribunal. Rome decided Walsh should remain a priest but spend 10 years in a monastery. That November, a by now desperate Archbishop Connell, petitioned Pope John Paul to dismiss Walsh from the priesthood. In January 1996, Pope Benedict XVI, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, issued a decree confirming Walsh’s dismissal.

In December 1997, Walsh was sentenced to consecutive terms of six years and four years for assaults on six boys. On appeal, this became six years. He was in prison until 2001 on that occasion.

It was in December 2010 he was sentenced to 16 years, four suspended, in a case involving Darren McGavin. According to Darren’s victim impact statement - prepared by psychiatrist Prof Ivor Browne - Walsh tied him up and raped him at the presbytery in Ballyfermot. Darren was “crying loudly” and “hysterical”. Walsh turned up the music to drown out the child’s cries.

Another incident took place at Enniscrone, Co Sligo. About 50 children from Ballyfermot were taken there by Walsh and three other priests, including Fr Cleary. Walsh took Darren to the sand dunes where he raped him. Sand caused the child to bleed, so Walsh brought him to the sea where he washed the blood off and saltwater stung the child’s wounds.

Darren was also raped by Walsh in Dublin’s Phoenix Park. 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 Darren back to the presbytery in Ballyfermot and showed him “a Bible with pictures of hell and said if he told anyone he would burn in hell and never go to heaven. Then he let him go home.”

At the December 2010 trial the jury found him guilty, unanimously, after just 94 minutes and on all 13 counts.

Tony Walsh was born in 1954 and ordained in 1978. Even as a seminarian at Dublin’s Clonliffe College, as emerged years later, he abused children and at the home of another abuser, Fr Noel Reynolds, to whose house he had a key.

In July 1978, two days after Walsh took up his first appointment as a curate in Ballyfermot, a complaint was received in Archbishop’s House that he had sexually abused an eight-year-old boy.

The next complaint was in 1979 when a mother went to the parish priest of Ballyfermot, the late Canon Val Rogers. Fr Cleary was despatched to educate the woman’s son on male sexuality. In 1985, Canon Rogers admitted this case had been “hushed up”.

Walsh was moved to Dublin’s Westland Row parish in February 1986. In January 1987 the housekeeper at Westland Row found condoms and syringes in Walsh’s room there and said “a number of boys had slept overnight in his bed and a boy from Ballyfermot had been visiting”.

Following his 2010 conviction he pleaded guilty to two more abuse cases in 2013 and in 2015 he was convicted by a jury in relation to the sexual abuse of a girl. In July 2016 he was jailed for a further seven-and-a-half years for raping a boy three times, once with a crucifix.