Bishop Emeritus Willie Walsh turned 90 in January, and this month celebrated 66 years a priest. As news of his passing breaks this morning, we recall an interview from last month with Joe Ó Muircheartaigh where he spoke to him about his life in the priesthood and the future of the Church in a changing world.

Friday evening and the bell rings on Bishop Emeritus Willie Walsh’s door on Clonroadmore in Ennis. It’s a friend he’s been expecting, and a chauffeur too as they’re heading across town to meet a few friends for a couple of hours.

All good. But along the way, the driver diverts slightly from the supposed destination of Cloughleigh to the Cusack Road to pop into Westbourne House – to drop a message into Bishop Fintan Monahan he says, while at the same time giving Bishop Willie a look at the place he called home for 16 years.

It turned out to be neither. Bishop Monahan was there alright to say hello, but instead of receiving a parcel he was receiving Bishop Willie, as were a lot more besides – something that soon became clear when the doors of Westbourne were thrown open.

“I was caught totally unawares,” reveals Willie. “Sr Marie McNamara is a friend of mine and she lives in Cloughleigh with another nun and we were going over there for tea and a chat.

“I went into Westbourne and my nieces and nephews were there with their children. I had no idea it was happening. They told me the planning for this started last October in Westbourne.

“In the previous few days, friends in Ennis were asking me if I was doing something with family to celebrate my birthday and just said ‘later when the weather is better’.

“They came from Waterford, from Dublin, from Armagh, Tipperary and Kilkenny. I was chuffed.”

Chuffed, because after turning 90 years young the previous day there were so many family members to celebrate this landmark birthday with him at the great seat of the Diocese of Killaloe which has been home to six bishops over the past hundred years and more.

Bishop Fogarty was the first tenant – after him followed Bishops Joseph Rodgers, Michael Harty, Willie Walsh himself, Kieran O’Reilly and Fintan Monaghan, with Willie being the first since Michael Fogarty to live into his 90s.

Sixty-six years a priest and now as a nonagenarian he’s fitter than he has been at any stage over the past year as he proved on Sunday when returning to St Peter and Paul Cathedral in Ennis to celebrate mass.

“Sixty-six years in February,” he reveals. “It’s a long spell I’ll rise to, but I’ve been very lucky health-wise, apart from a bad knockout I got in 2013.

“It was shortly after the All-Ireland in 2013 – November and it took me 12 months to get over it, but since then I’ve been in good health all the time except for the last 12 months with my back.
“I say mass every morning with the retired nuns in the convent down near Dunnes, but I used to say mass on Sundays in Ennis for Clarecastle, but when this back problem occurred I wasn’t able to anymore, because I couldn’t stand for that length of time.

“But with it being much improved I just said I’d like to mark my 90th by saying mass in the Ennis Cathedral, because I suppose it was, and it has been such a huge part of my life as a priest,” he adds.

If anything, that’s an understatement. That short trip from Clonroadmore on Sunday was one that he made for the first time nearly 80 years ago, well 78 to be precise, after he landed in Ennis for the first time in his life when he was not yet a teenager and a first year in St Flannan’s College from faraway Roscrea.

“Once a month we used to be marched up from St Flannan’s to the Cathedral to go to confession and then we’d be marched back again,” he recalls. “There’d be no going into shops or anything like that or we didn’t see much of the town, just up and back,” he adds.

As Willie recounts those earliest trips to the Cathedral for confession through to going up there for mass on Sunday he’s in the reading/television room of his house that straight across the road from St Flannan’s College.
The house is in the shadow of the college, but he’s not in its shadow because the school and wider Ennis have been such a huge part of his life and have ensured that – through his work life as a student, a teacher, a priest and a hurling man – that he’s long since been adopted as a Clareman and one of their own.

“I came to St Flannan’s and to Ennis in 1947,” he recalls. “It has very much shaped my life, I’d say. “I’d say when I came to Flannan’s it was my first time crossing the river into Clare,” he recalls. “In 1946, I went to Thurles to the All-Ireland Final, in which the Cistercian College Roscrea were playing Flannan’s, and I was shouting, naturally, for Roscrea. And myself and my brother were expected to be in Roscrea, as boarders in the school.

“I don’t know whether we were officially booked, but I know we sat an entrance exam to it, and our understanding was we were going to Roscrea. And then my parents changed their mind, and I suspect that it was one of the local clergy who persuaded them to send us to Flannan’s.

“That’s the kind of way that accidents of life shape your life. I still remember my uncle had an old car and he drove us to Flannan’s. I think it was an old Ford. I have a memory of going into Rineanna on the way, and seeing a couple of airplanes on the ground. I never saw an airplane on the ground before that.

“It was just the beginning of Shannon Airport. My memory of it was a scatter of timber huts around the place, and then coming to a couple of villages, Newmarket-on-Fergus and Clarecastle and then to Ennis. Clarecastle was very separate to Ennis that time. I have a memory of that, and of a winding narrow road to the school, and then settling in there in the school.

“As a student, it was tough going. There was no doubt about it. The facilities were quite poor, and food wasn’t of great quality. There was still rationing of things like bread and butter and that sort of thing.
“There was no central heating. Discipline, of course, was quite strong. The philosophy was, spare the rod and spoil the child. You had to take it for granted that you would be slapped, and sometimes get a bit of a hammering. We had two teachers who were very severe, who’d slap you in the face.

“Most of the other teachers, by standards at that time, were kind. But you took it for granted that you’d be punished, either for not doing your homework, or doing it very badly, or not doing it at all. You’d be punished for other breaches of discipline, ducking a smoke, or things like that. It was tough.

“I think that hurling eased it a lot, for those of us who were interested in hurling. Games were officially compulsory. You had to tog out every evening, unless you had a special exemption. And while most of us, I suppose, took it for granted and enjoyed the games, it must have been pretty awful for people who didn’t. But generally speaking, it was a fairly harsh regime, as every boarding school was at that time.”

It was while he was there, of course, that his association with hurling in the county began, even if he was still very much a Tipperary man in Clare in his formative years – something he found out to his own cost and explains in an amusing tale from over 75 years ago.

“Occasionally we were allowed to go to Cusack Park to see a game, and I remember a game from 1949 in particular,” he recalls. “That year Clare had played Tipperary in the championship, but the big one was the game against Cork (that went to a replay). We were listening to the match on the radio in Flannan’s and all the Clare lads were shouting for Cork. Us Tipp lads were bucking mad.

“Then later that year, in September, Clare were playing London in the All-Ireland Junior Final in Cusack Park and we got to go. A few of us Tipperary lads got together and shouted for London and they won the match in the last few minutes.

“We were marched back to the college and the President gave us a lecture on how we had disgraced the college. That night there was supposed to be a showing of a film of the All-Ireland final that Tipperary won against Laois that year in the school, but because of our disgraceful behaviour it was cancelled. I remember it well.”

Of course, it didn’t stop him gradually switching his allegiance to Clare, through his association with hurling through, school, club and county, while it was through St Flannan’s that he also found his vocation.

“It was my last year in Flannan’s that I decided on the priesthood,” he recalls. “I always really liked mathematics and physics and that sort of thing and I had in my mind to do engineering.

“At that time in Flannan’s priests would come in to talk to us. They’d be working on the missions in Africa and various places and putting the idea of priesthood before us.

“Then there was a whole atmosphere at that time in Ireland that kind of, that in some way gave you a message that priesthood was the very best thing you could do with your life. It’s totally different nowadays.

“People would find it hard to understand why somebody might devote their lives to priesthood. But certainly, I’d say, and my parents were quite religious people in the old tradition.

“My mother was, I described my mother as a pious, very pious person. Religion meant a lot to her. My father was a dutiful person. You know, he’d always take for granted you went to mass on Sunday and so on.

They would have gone to Lough Derg on pilgrimages and various things like that. It was a sort of, I suppose, atmosphere you grew up in. I said one time you cut the hay in June, you went to mass on Sunday, you didn’t ask why. You did these things that was very much part of life growing up.

“I suppose that affected my decision to go to Maynooth. There was no pressure by my parents or anything like that. It was very much my own decision. There were something around the mid-50s, 54 or 55 lads, who sat to the Leaving Cert in 1952. I believe there were more than 20 lads in seminaries the following September.

“There were nine of us who went to Maynooth. Some went to Carlow, some went to Thurles. That was the atmosphere at the time. When I tell that to young people today, they can’t believe it.

“It was an extraordinary period in the Irish Church. There were 95 in my own class. I think there were around 550 altogether in Maynooth studying for priesthood at the time I was there. There are now, I think, 30.

“It’s a completely different world. But that’s the way it was. I suppose the whole atmosphere of the country and so on was very much religious. It was dominated by religion.”

Willie spent three years in Maynooth before he moved to the Irish College in Rome to finish his studies and was ordained there in 1959 and after a holiday at home returned there for a further three years to complete post-graduate studies.

“I was seven years there in total and there were over 60 Irish College students,” he recalls. “Maybe less than half of us were interested in hurling. Then there were other Irish students around in other colleges in Rome an people who were studying for the missions, that sort of thing.

“We used to rent a soccer pitch every week and we’d go out with our hurleys. The Romans, of course, had no idea what it was about. We played hurling fairly regularly, once a week.

“When in Rome we didn’t have Irish radio, but we had a fella from Dublin and his mother posted the sports page of the Irish Independent in the GPO every Monday morning during the sporting time and we used to get it in the Tuesday evening post.

All of us who were interested in hurling and football, when the evening post arrived, would be there and somebody would read out the sports pages. I suppose having a connection with home like that was important.

“There was a phone in the college, but I was seven years in Rome, I spoke on the phone once. The phone call was very rare at that time. The call I got was when my father was very ill. They rang me and told me to come home if I could. I went back and he recovered.

“We came home every second year, every second summer. When you were home you said goodbye for two years. We had a house down, half-way between Rome and Naples, that we went to. It was a very basic kind of summer house, but it was right on the sea.

If we didn’t come home, we went there to a town called Formia. All we had to do was cross the road into the sea. It’s now a hotel. It’s now Hotel Irlandese.

“All the time we had letter writing. You wrote home practically every week. My mother did the writing and I got a letter nearly every week. It was the means of communication.”

“When I came back I was told straight away that I was going to be teaching in Flannan’s and I spent a year in Galway then, doing the HDip and came back to Flannan’s in 63. I spent 25 years there and was very happy teaching. I always regarded teaching as, to some extent, a privilege.

“When I came back we had a president called John Cuddy. As a student, I had no great liking for John Cuddy. As a principal, when I came back, I thought that he kind of civilised the place.

“He made it very clear that he didn’t want the teachers doing physical punishment, which was before his time. And he called staff meetings and all that sort of thing, which again were before his time.

“I think we were lucky that a number of younger teachers came in. In my time, people like Seamus Gardiner, Jim Powell, Reuben Butler. Then of course in 1967 when the free education came in, we had a whole host of new young teachers, lay teachers and they brought an extra vision to it. I’d like to think that we certainly were, if not ahead of most schools, we certainly were very much up there, fairly high, in regard to relationships between students and staff.

“By and large I think past students of that era would have, well wouldn’t have bad memories of the place, and some of them would have quite good memories of the place. But I think we were lucky that way.

“I found it difficult to leave the college. I would have been quite happy to continue teaching for the rest of my life. But I think it was a good thing in fact for me, because schools can be a very small world, and you kind of focus on that, and you ignore the wider world.

“Transferring to the parish was a new experience. In the school, you had very little contact with older people. I found that interesting, going out to the parish and meeting with older people.

“And very often people were confined to houses that you’d visit and bring communion to them if they wanted it. With some of these older people, it was sad, they were lonely and so on. Some of them were wonderful.”

Willie’s work in the parish initially led to his appointment of Administrator of Ennis Parish in 1990 and then four years later he was selected as the heir apparent to Dr Michael Harty as Bishop of Killaloe in 1994 at a time when he was busy as a selector with the Clare hurling team in the middle of a Munster Championship campaign.

“Did that come as a surprise?,” he muses. “Not as a total surprise, because some of the clergy would have often said to me, ‘ah you’ll probably be the next bishop’. I suppose I was fairly involved with diocesan work. I got the call from the Nuncio and he asked me to come and see him. I knew then.

“I mean Michael Harty had always said that he was going to retire and wasn’t going to go on to 75, because he had been there for such a long time. He had done, when he died he was 27 years, but he had been insisting that he wouldn’t go on to 75.

“And then suddenly, a couple of months after I was appointed as co-adjutor, he died, so I was kind of straight in. I knew it was a possibility.”

It was the summer of 1994 and it was a challenging time for the Church – and it was only going to get more challenging, something that Willie knew was coming down the tracks from a few years previously thanks to his experience and knowledge of Church Law.

“On two occasions I was asked, with Father Ignatius Murphy and another priest from the Dublin area by the Archbishop of Dublin to examine a situation where a priest had abused and to decide if he should be laicized, in other words banned from priesthood altogether. That was in the late 80s.

“So by the time I was made bishop, I was aware that this was becoming a real issue, and I had some grasp, some understanding of it. I was hoping to God that I wouldn’t be faced with it. The reality is that I was faced with it very quickly afterwards.

“It was very difficult for me, but how difficult was it for the victims? I always kept that in mind. I had a very good committee of people who were skilled in that whole area, that I could consult, without revealing any names or that sort of thing. And they helped me to a great deal.

“But it could be at times be very lonely, I often sat down on my own at night over in Westbourne, and cried after listening to the suffering of a victim. But at least I had somebody to call in the next day or two and if you like, to release the story. But very often the victim went home alone.

“I did give a lot of time to it. I suppose you had to. You had to. I had to. I mean any person that wanted to see me in connection with that, I never said see some senior cleric or senior layperson. Always, any person who wanted to see me, they were welcome to come and I listened to them. So I was very conscious of that whole area.

“I thought the only way of handling it was to be open and honest about it. I always think that if you’re not prepared to talk about it, I think people are inclined to think that it’s even worse than the reality.

“As individuals, we all have an instinct to protect ourselves. And I think that carries into organisations, whether it’s church or whether it’s a corporation or whether it’s GAA – I think the first reaction is to protect the institution. But in the long run it’s only doing further damage to the institution if you’re not upfront.”

Willie Walsh always was through it all and that’s why when asked about his views on the Church that he joined nearly 73 years ago when going to Maynooth in the autumn of 1952, his answers are important and need to be heard.
Where does he think the Church will go now? Down the road, in the next couple of generations, when we’re gone, will they grasp that nettle about priests and say they’re allowed to marry?

“I think that there are certain values in celibacy,” he says. “I suppose the ideal thing is that it leaves you free to help others. But I think it also does some of us damage. I think it leaves us, in some way, less than complete as human beings. I think that the regulation of celibacy will be ultimately changed.

“I would certainly have experienced loneliness in my own life, and lots of struggles in many ways. Because you take a vow of celibacy, it doesn’t mean that you’re not going to be attracted sexually towards some people. It can leave you lonely. I do think that it’s a question that we really have to face up to.”

The possibility of women being ordained?“There’s no sign of that, and I think it would take a long time. I’ve never been convinced by the arguments that are used that this was in some way the will of God or whatever.

“I’ve never been convinced by those arguments, you know, if Christ had wanted women to go to full ministry, he’d have (women apostles). He called the apostles; they were all male. That’s the sort of argument that is used. But then, at that time, it was a male-dominated society, and it was, you know, that was the reality at that time.

“I’m not convinced that that’s a valid argument for non-admission for women to go to ministry. The wider question, where the church is going, I don’t know. I see the reality that there are smaller, very much smaller numbers going to church.

“And those who are going tend to be the upper age group, 50s down. You know, very few are going. I go into the Gaelscoil in preparation for First Communion and Confirmation.

“The youngsters there, very few of them would be going to Mass or that sort of thing. I know of my own nephews, nieces, grand-nephews and grand-nieces – most of them are not regular churchgoers.

“And probably they don’t see any much relevance in what they see as, you know, Sunday Mass and things like that. I’m not in any despair about it. But I don’t know how it’s going to pan out eventually.

“I mean, the reality is that even looking at our own diocese, we have something like, I think, 28 or 29 parishes now where there is no resident priest under 75 years. We have a number of priests looking after parishes up to their 80s, or early 80s. I don’t know how many now parishes that have no resident priest, but I think 29.”

These are sobering statistics, indeed.
And, who better to deliver them than Bishop Emeritus Willie Walsh at 90.