Victim impact statements
“DAVID”
At the age of 12 – after five years of being molested and raped – David first realised what was happening to him was wrong.
An altar boy in Ballyfermot, David was just seven when he first met Tony Walsh. The cleric was well known as an Elvis impersonator and part of the All Priests Show.
Having ingratiated himself with David’s family, Walsh brought the boy back to the parochial home on a regular basis. He would play Elvis records for him or help him with homework. Then the abuse started.
“He would put me sitting on his lap and would rock me up and down to the music. We would both be clothed and he would rub my leg and privates from outside my clothes. He’d keep me in my room for about 15 minutes. He would then give me crisps or sweets and let me go.”
Soon the abuse escalated to indecent assault and, later, buggery.
“Things changed as the rape became more severe,” David recalls. “That was when I started to feel fear towards him; he tied me up over a coffee table, my hands and legs bound with the cord he used to fasten his clerical vestments. He then raped me.”
David says Walsh told him that if he told anyone what had happened, he would “burn in the flames of hell for all eternity”.
“I became rebellious and bitter towards life. My trust was gone towards people. I couldn’t trust anybody. I began taking Prozac and Valium, which I stole out of my mother’s handbag. I took these to blot out the pain and fear.”
His life descended into turmoil. He left school at 15. A year later, he left the family home. He ended up sleeping rough in the Phoenix Park. One day he attempted suicide by jumping off a railway bridge and shattered his left ankle.
He was later signed into St Loman’s psychiatric hospital where he was heavily sedated. It was the first of numerous attempts to take his own life and the beginning of numerous admissions into psychiatric care.
“I missed my family and yet I didn’t feel I belonged anywhere. I alienated myself from society because I didn’t feel I could trust my family or anyone around me.”
As recently as last month he was admitted to hospital again after Walsh was found guilty.
He now attends the Rape Crisis Centre and the Institute of Psychosocial Medicine in Sandycove, where he receives support from Prof Ivor Browne; he has been separately diagnosed as suffering from severe bouts of psychotic depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Prof Browne says that in spite of David’s experiences, he has managed to maintain a reasonable working life as a painter and decorator.
“He is a highly intelligent and capable person,” he wrote in a psychiatric report, “. . . and provided he completes the psychotherapy in which we are engaged, he can still have a reasonable future.”
" NOEL"
Walsh became a friend of Noel’s family in Ballyfermot and was a regular visitor for dinner and tea; he was so trusted that he even borrowed the victim’s father’s car from time to time.
He, too, was brought back to the parochial house to listen to Elvis records.
Noel remembers at one stage Walsh telling him to sit on his knee and he could feel the priest’s erection. He also recalls being asked to lie face down, while the priest gyrated on top of him. He was too young to realise at the time he was simulating sexual intercourse.
The abuse happened regularly over the course of several months. When he told his parents – both devoutly religious – they refused to believe him.
“My parents didn’t believe me . . . my mother said: ‘How could you say that about a man of the cloth, a man of God?’ . . . my father gave me a hiding which started in the kitchen and finished in the bedroom.”
He was told to go back to see Walsh again. This time, he brought a boy from next door with him. They arrived on skateboards; the priest told the younger boy to stay outside and he abused Noel in his room.
After this he grew angry towards Walsh and kept his distance from him wherever possible.
Over the years Noel says he put the experiences towards the back of his mind and “built a wall around them”. “I buried the memories because my parents didn’t believe me,” he says.
During his teens, his relationship with his mother and father broke down. This, he says, was as devastating as the impact of the abuse itself.
“TIM”
Tim was about 12 years of age when the abuse began. The first incident Tim remembers was when he was having his Confession heard. Walsh told him he could sit on his knee, and then the priest began to feel his body under his top.
Tim says he remembers not understanding what was happening, but knowing that it wasn’t right. “He had a huge power over me,” he says. “My mother and grandmother were strong believers in the Catholic Church.”
In another incident, he remembers Walsh hearing his Confession, while removing his own top and touching Tim through his trousers, all the while completing the process of Confession.
The abuse escalated when Walsh picked Tim up after school in his car and offered him a lift; he stopped off at the parochial house en route. There he told Tim to lie face down on a couch. Walsh lay on top of him, making gyrating movements.
“I remember thinking, ‘When will this be over, when can I leave?’” he says.
On another occasion, Walsh stopped at the house to bring Tim to the All Priests Show. The same abuse occurred at the parochial house en route. Tim remembers being given a seat at the front row of the show afterwards and just wishing it was all over.
Today, his mother feels she is to blame for the abuse. Tim has problems at work and freezes under pressure, especially with male colleagues. He finds it much easier to be friends with women and he distrusts men.
The names have been changed to protect the victims’ identities.