Darren McGavin is now a middle-aged man in his 50s. Our first meeting, in Dublin’s St Stephen’s Green shopping centre many years ago, was one of the few occasions in my life when I wept in public.
I belong, very much, to the “weep alone” brigade when it comes to emotional issues. But I couldn’t help it then, even though Darren and I, drinking our coffee, were surrounded by so many people at tables nearby. I kept seeing the small boy, not the man before me, being brutalised.
His recollection of incidents of sexual abuse by Fr Tony Walsh were vivid, detailed and told with the calm delivery of a man who had been over the ground many times. By then, having talked to many other abuse survivors, I was somewhat familiar with the consequences such abuse would have had for Darren in his life as a young adult.
I recognised the destructive pattern already: the addictions to drink and drugs, the utter turmoil, the confusions, broken relationships, the low self-esteem, the suicide attempts. Even so, I remain amazed at the resilience of survivors – women and men – who survive all that to live calm, ordinary, fulfilling lives. Wounded, but unbowed.
I cannot remember how Darren and I first met, but suspect it must have been through that sainted woman, the late Angela Copley, whose gentle ministrations saved the lives of so many young men in Ballyfermot who had been sexually abused as children by priests locally. She lost some too. They could no longer cope.
Angela, whose warm embrace was as big as her heart, was the “go-to person” for many of us in the media reporting on the abuse of children in Ballyfermot parish and beyond. She and I spoke frequently, and through her I met Darren and others who had been abused as children by priests. Many did not want to discuss what they had been through publicly and that was always respected.
Trust was crucial and losing that trust in just one case would be enough to end it where all others were concerned. And Angela was key to that trust. If she trusted you, then these people would too. She was like a great mother hen, fiercely protective of her damaged “charges”, with a typical no nonsense, down-to-earth Dublin sense of humour.
Some agreed to speak to me about what had happened to them as background for articles I was writing. Darren, on the other hand, agreed to be interviewed by me for The Irish Times. So we arranged to meet in the Stephen’s Green Centre, which he knew and was not too far from the paper’s offices. His story remains one of the worst I’ve heard.
In June 2018 Darren spoke eloquently at Angela’s funeral in Ballyfermot’s St Matthew’s Church. I was impressed by his composure as he spoke from the altar and remembered how he was panicking the first time he went to see her.
“She came out to the door to me and, the little nod – ‘Howya’. I says, ‘Can I have a talk with you?’, and she said, ‘We’ll have a cup of tea and we’ll go somewhere private.’ And we just started talking. That was 21 years ago. To say I was humbled and honoured to have her in my life would be an understatement.”
There were “many people like me in the Ballyfermot area,” he said.
Angela’s son Derek then spoke of how, in setting up a support group for clerical child sex abuse survivors in Ballyfermot, she “mothered” so many in the area.
“Myself and Gary are her sons, but there’s a lot of sons and daughters out there my ma helped, that she mothered through the years.”
He remembered one Christmas morning when the doorbell rang and a stranger asked, “Is Angela there?” and she said, “Bring him in, bring him in”.
Said Derek, “I thought it was just another visitor till he sat down and Ma starts bringing out the dinner. There was an extra plate there and I said, ‘I suppose I’d better get to know ya’. It was, he recalled, “very typical. It was kind of funny in a way, the seriousness of what she dealt with. After a while it became normalised in our house”.
So extreme had been Darren’s abuse by Tony Walsh that the former priest was sentenced in December 2010 to a total of 123 years imprisonment. Five of the 13 counts, for buggery, attracted sentences of 10, 12, 14, 16 and [another] 16 years each. The remaining counts, for indecent assault, brought sentences ranging from four to nine years each.
As Walsh was to serve his sentences concurrently, 16 years was the maximum time he would spend in jail for those crimes. Four years of that were suspended when a psychologist’s report said it was unlikely that he would offend again. It was the most severe sentence imposed on a clerical child sex abuser in Ireland.
Walsh remains in jail and is likely to be there for many years to come because he has since been sentenced in connection with the abuse of other children. In more recent cases he has begun to plead guilty.
At the trial for his abuse of Darren McGavin, Walsh pleaded not guilty. Sitting in that courtroom, one of the most remarkable things I observed throughout the hearing was the ex-priest’s demeanour of complete indifference; there was not a hint of remorse.
He was also tried in connection with the abuse of a second Ballyfermot man as a child. This man had asked us in the media not to name him in our reports because he had just told his two sons days beforehand about what had happened to him as a child and one son was unable to handle it.
What Walsh did to Darren McGavin as a small boy is unbearable to recall, never mind what it must have been like to endure. As he told me himself at that first meeting, and as relayed in his victim impact statement presented at the trial, prepared with psychiatrist Prof Ivor Browne (who attended the trial also), in one instance Walsh raped him with his wrists tied to his ankles as he was made to lie across a coffee table at the presbytery in Ballyfermot, which Walsh then shared with Fr Michael Cleary and his housekeeper, Phyllis Hamilton, with whom, it emerged later, Cleary had two sons. Darren was “crying loudly” and “hysterical”. Walsh, who had turned up the music to drown out the child’s cries, took “about an hour to calm me down. I then went home,” Darren said. This assault led to one of the 16-year sentences.
Another incident took place at Enniscrone, Co Sligo. About 50 children from Ballyfermot were taken there for a break by Walsh and three other priests, including Cleary. Walsh took Darren to the sand dunes where he raped him. The child was bleeding so Walsh brought him to the sea where he washed off the blood, but the salt water stung the child’s wounds, adding to his pain and distress.
This was the incident which drove me over the emotional edge when Darren and I first met for that interview in the Stephen’s Green Centre. The callous indifference of Walsh to the suffering of a small boy of six or seven, already bleeding because of the rape, was bad enough, but then to add further injury by dipping the child in salt water to help cover up the crime seemed monstrous.
Darren was also raped by Walsh in Dublin’s Phoenix Park. Afterwards, Walsh wiped him with “a purple sash [stole] he had with him”. He brought Darren back to the presbytery in Ballyfermot, “put on Elvis records . . . and gave me a glass of Coke”. “He then showed me a Bible with pictures of hell and said if I told anyone I would burn in hell and never go to heaven. Then he let me go home.”
One evening Darren told his mother a watered-down version of what was happening. They had been watching a BBC programme about child sexual abuse. Outraged, she went to the presbytery in Ballyfermot and knocked, accompanied by Darren’s aunt. The door was answered by Phyllis Hamilton, who denied that Walsh was inside.
Darren’s mother insisted he must be in because his car was there. They thought they had seen him through a window. Hamilton went inside and Walsh came to the door. He denied everything. As Prof Browne put it in the victim impact report: “then, knowing the game was up, Walsh stopped abusing Darren altogether and terminated their relationship”.
As well as Angela Copley, Prof Browne is a major reason Darren is still with us today. A pioneering psychiatrist, who helped remove the stigma from mental illness in Ireland and who was central in moving psychiatric care away from huge, forbidding institutions, this extraordinary man helped Darren stabilise a life that was out of control owing to substance abuse and turbulent, unstable relationships.
A tall, elegant, reserved figure, his calm presence in the courtroom during the Tony Walsh trial made a deep impression on all. His presence in the courtroom, as well as that of Angela, was the support that enabled Darren to give evidence with confidence. Over the following years, until Prof Browne’s death, he and Darren became like father and son, an addition to the psychiatrist’s already large family. They were so close that Darren was one of those at his bedside when he died at the age of 94 on January 24th, 2024.
Tony Walsh spent eight years trying to stop his trial from going ahead, exhausting the judicial review process en route. He had failed similarly in another case in 1997. That time, after another round-the-houses judicial review process funded by free legal aid, he eventually pleaded guilty and served time. But he forced the December 2010 trial involving Darren McGavin by denying all charges. The jury found him guilty, unanimously, on all 13 counts after just 94 minutes.
All these years later, Darren is still in recovery. He believes he always will be. He suffers bouts of depression but takes his medication and attends counselling. Darren’s abuse by Walsh ended when he was 11, but it took 10 years before he felt he could do anything about it. The intervening years were marked by much drug abuse and as many as “five or six” suicide attempts.
Then he decided enough was enough and went to the gardaí, who were sympathetic and supportive from the beginning. That was in 1993. It would take 17 years to successfully prosecute the case against Walsh, but Darren and the gardaí persisted.
Det Garda Brendan Walsh, now retired, was prosecuting garda in the case.
Darren recalled: “When I first met Brendan in Ballyfermot Garda station to give the statement, I’d never seen a guard step out of a room so much in temper and anger. Before we left the station that day he said to me, ‘This case is going to see me into retirement,’ and it did. It took that long to get the still ‘Father’ Tony Walsh at the time [he was laicised later] locked up.’
Darren has three children: two, both now adults, with one long-term partner, and a third with a more recent partner. He trained as a counsellor to help other people and has been in a good place for many years now.
Well, Holy God: My Life as an Irish, Catholic, Agnostic Correspondent by Patsy McGarry is published by Merrion Press
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