PRELATE'S ADDRESS:CATHOLIC ARCHBISHOP of Dublin Diarmuid Martin has apologised unreservedly to the people of Ballyfermot in Dublin following the abuse of children there by former priest Tony Walsh, "and about the way this abuse was hushed up by people with responsibility in the parish and in the diocese".
Speaking during Mass at the Church of the Assumption in Ballyfermot yesterday, he said: “I came here this morning to renew my apologies to the people of this parish for the facts that this week have emerged.”
He was referring to the jailing of Walsh for 16 years last Monday, four suspended, following his conviction of the sexual abuse of three boys from Ballyfermot during the late 1970s to the early 1980s.
“I come to bring my apology to a parish to which I owe much. I grew up here; it is a parish to which I belonged and to which I feel I still belong. It is a parish which grew up in hardship, but whose people worked hard and supported each other and above all gave themselves so that their children could do well in life. This has been the story of Ballyfermot for years, as it is today,” he said.
He asked: “How do I explain to a community marked by such honesty, good neighbourliness and hard work that the church failed many children of this parish?”
Many of those who came forward “did not want to damage the church they loved. They simply wanted abuse to be stopped, effectively and definitively. Their love of the church was betrayed by leadership in the church,” he said.
He could not “but recall that in the years in which I lived in this parish I was exactly at the age of many of the children who were abused by Tony Walsh and sadly by a number of other priests who worked in this parish over the years. I apologise unreservedly.”
Looking back, he said, “I see more clearly that the catastrophic manner in which the abuse was dealt with was a symptom of a deeper malaise within the Irish church . . . It had often become self-centred and arrogant . . . and rarely empathised with the hurt of children.”
The first step on the road to renewal was for the church to “honestly acknowledge with no ‘buts’ . . . the gravity and the extent of what happened”, he said.