The notorious 'Singing Priest' Tony Walsh is to serve a 15-month jail sentence for sexually abusing two boys in Dublin in 1979. The new sentence will be added on to the 16 years the defrocked cleric received for similar crimes on 9 other boys in the 1970s and 1980s.
The 59-year-old with a former address on the North Circular Road, pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to two counts of indecent assault on January 1st and April 4th 1979.
The victims were aged between 10 and 11. The maximum sentence is 2 years.
Judge Martin Nolan said the former priest had acted with 'cold blooded intent'.
He described the assaults as 'aggressive in nature and incredibly frightening and violent' from the boys' point of view. The judge noted that the victims’ families were church goers who had real confidence in the church which in this case was greatly misplaced.
He described the evidence as ‘graphic ‘and ‘disturbing' and said the effects on the victims were ‘serious and long-term’.
Victims happy with onsecutive sentence
Tony Walsh features in the Murphy Report on the church’s handling of clerical abuse. The Elvis impersonator was a star of the 'All Priests Show'.
Because of this, one of the victims in the case said he had felt ‘special’ when he was offered a chance to travel in the priest's white BMW on Good Friday 1979.
The boy thought they were going to visit friends but he was taken to the Parochial House and sexually abused. After the assault Walsh, then aged in his 20s, took the boy to a nearby hotel and bought him a drink and a fry-up.
The victim did not tell his mother about the abuse until he was 14. He did however tell her about the hotel visit and she was shocked that the priest had bought a fry on Good Friday.
The other boy was abused the same year when Fr. Walsh caught him eating sweets outside church. It only came to light in 2008 during bereavement counselling after the victim's father had died.
Commenting on the sentence, Angela Copley of the clerical abuse victims support group Revive said that for the deprivation Tony Walsh had caused it was nothing.
However she said the two victims were happy the sentence was imposed consecutively to the 16 years sentence Walsh is currently serving.
