deportation Brother of man killed by Tina Cahill in Australia speaks of pain as she faces freedom

'He adored and lived for family, and his friends he counted as family, us all together were life to him'

Tina Cahill

Neil Fetherstonhaugh

February 16 2022 10:13 AM

The brother of Enniscorthy man, David ‘Motcha’ Walsh, who was killed by his fiancée Tina Cahill during a row at a house in Sydney, Australia, has spoken of his family’s pain as she is about to be released from prison.

The New Ross woman was jailed in 2017, having pleaded guilty to manslaughter. She was sentenced to eight years in jail, however, she is now eligible for parole and will walk free later this week.

She will then be immediately deported from Australia, just five years into her sentence.

Ahead of her release, Mr Walsh’s brother, Paddy, issued a statement to the Enniscorthy Guardian, to say how Motcha was a “the very best brother, a son, a friend, and most special dad”.

“He adored and lived for family, and his friends he counted as family, us all together were life to him. He loved fun and he loved adventure,” Paddy said.

“I feel now and only now I will say what I think is right. My family stayed silent and his friends respected us in that way too because we never needed to tell the world how amazing and special Motcha was; the people who knew him knew the truth and for me and my family that is all that matters.

“People will speak ill about him one way or another and think they know it all because the media say it, people say it, and what we never argued it was carried on.

“Tina was no one we knew, we spoke only before we had planned to leave Ireland on holiday to see my brother. I knew nothing of her and nothing that carried on in their time together. If I knew then what I now know I would have been there long before I was.

“He would be home and he would be here.”

During her trial hearing, judge who sentenced Cahill described her relationship with Walsh as “volatile”, and involved aggression on both sides.

In an interview from jail in 2017, Cahill said she was upset about being in prison, but added: “I have to serve some penalty for what I did.

"I can’t really remember what happened. Of course I regret it, I’m still shocked, I loved him.”

She was sentenced to eight years in prison but was eligible for parole after serving five years.

A spokesperson for the State Parole Authority in New South Wales told the Sunday World her parole has been granted and she “will be removed from Australia immediately upon her release from custody on February 17 and deported”.

A pre-release report assessed her as having a “low-risk of reoffending”.

On the night of February 17, 2017, the couple had been socialising with a number of friends before a row broke out, with neighbours reporting loud noises coming from their property.

The fatal incident occurred when Mr Walsh launched an unprovoked attack on a man who had been invited back to their house in Padstow, Sydney, by Cahill and two other female housemates after they met him at a pub.

Cahill, who had also been drinking, tried to stop the attack, then took out a large, very sharp knife from the cutlery drawer and stabbed him.

Cathrina 'Tina' Cahill killed her fiancé David 'Daithi' Walsh in 2017

At the time she had been on a good behaviour bond after she was convicted of recklessly wounding him with a glass candle holder in 2015.

Cahill gave evidence about his repeated violence, including punching strangers and biting her all over her body, his accusations of her sleeping with other men and his deleting texts from her phone.

Judge Peter Johnson said he did not believe Cahill intended to kill him and found Mr Walsh used “controlling conduct, verbal abuse and demeaning language towards Cahill, who responded with the use of violence, including the use of weapons, usually at times when both were intoxicated”.

He accepted her account of the relationship, observing their marriage was “doomed to fail”. The pair had been engaged for just five weeks when she killed him.

Judge Johnson said the victim impact statements from Mr Walsh’s family “reflect the enormous loss suffered by each of them, and the terrible news of his death received by them in Ireland from a distant land”.

Mr Walsh’s ex-partner and the mother of his three daughters wrote in her statement: “Once you picked up that knife you took my children’s lives away too.”

His older brother wrote that their father died 10 months later ‘from a broken heart’, while their mother had become an empty shell of her former self.

In his statement to the Enniscorthy Guardian, Paddy added that while his brother was “no angel, he did get in trouble, he was in fights, but not to the extent he was evil, or anything Tina claims.

“Tina was charged before for the abuse my brother received from her hands,” he added.

“His friend, a year before he died, tried to get Motcha away from Tina.

“He made her and many others promise they would never tell us his family. He lost his life, he lost his right to love or be loved.

“He lost his right to watch his children grow up, he lost his right to be walking them down an aisle one day, never to hug, or hear him again. She took that from us, she took him from us.

“We have never been the same.”