David Shoebridge's Request for an Inquest into Father Glen Walsh and Other Catholic Suicides Deserves Support

Newcastle Herald
August 29, 2020

https://www.newcastleherald.com.au/story/6900595/david-shoebridges-request-for-an-inquest-into-father-glen-walsh-and-other-catholic-suicides-deserves-support/?cs=12

Bob O'Toole outside the Catholic Maitland-Newcastle headquarters in Hunter Street, Newcastle West, last week, when David Shoebridge first called for an investigation into the deaths of Father Glen Walsh and others. Picture: Marina Neil

AS foreshadowed last week in the Newcastle Herald, Greens MLC David Shoebridge has written formally to the NSW Coroner, Teresa O'Sullivan, and the Attorney General, Mark Speakman, seeking a coronial inquest into the death of Catholic priest Father Glen Walsh, as well as a broader investigation into dozens of suicides, overdoses and other deaths by misadventure of boys and men from the Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle.

This is a call that the Herald supports without qualification.

It is also a call the diocese says it supports, having posted a statement on its website yesterday, "welcoming a police inquiry into the tragic suicide" of Father Walsh.

At the same time, however, the diocese says that "as stated previously, (it) does not believe there is substantive gain to be had from further judicial inquiries".

In his call for an inquest, Mr Shoebridge submitted a detailed spreadsheet containing the names and details of 71 such deaths, compiled over the past six years by abuse survivor Bob O'Toole, with the help of several others.

Mr O'Toole is well-known in this region as the founder of the Clergy Abused Network, but he wishes to stress that the list is not a network project.

Nor is it a finished work.

In January 2015, Joanne McCarthy reported the list had more than 30 names. The youngest, at 13, was a then unnamed Andrew Nash.

The most recent, at that time, had died the previous year, 2014.

Since then, the list has effectively doubled in size, and Mr O'Toole says more names have been added since the Royal Commission concluded in December 2017.

In response to the publication last week of The Altar Boys, Mr O'Toole said he was contacted by a man in his 70s who said he had been abused at a Catholic school in the diocese as a boy, and whose son had taken his own life, the father feared, because he, too, had suffered under Catholic hands.

Yesterday's statement from the church acknowledged "terrible levels" of child sexual abuse in the diocese.

But Mr Shoebridge, Mr O'Toole and The Altar Boys author Suzanne Smith say that in continuing to describe these events as "historic", the church is trying to diminish their significance.

The abuse - we hope - has stopped, but the catastrophic after-effects still plague the lives of those who have survived.

An inquiry is not only justified on the available evidence, it may help dissuade others from joining the 71 on Mr O'Toole's list.