Thomas Dunlea

Thomas Vincent Dunlea (19 April 1894 – 22 August 1970) was an Irish-Australian Catholic priest known for his involvement in charitable works.

Dunlea was born in Ballina, Ireland, to Michael and Bridget Dunlea. He attended primary school in Killaloe and High School at Mount St Joseph’s Monastery in Roscrea. In 1914 he entered the College of Mount Melleray, a Cistercian seminary. He was ordained a Roman Catholic priest on 20 June 1920.

In 1920 he set off on the RMS Olympic arriving in Sydney, Australia in December.

Some of his appointments were:

In 1939 he started Boys' Town (Engadine), New South Wales based on Father Flanagan's Boys Town, Nebraska, USA.

In the late 1940s he was working among alcoholics with Dr Sylvester Minogue and Archibald McKinnon of the Darlinghurst reception house. For a time the pioneer Alcoholics Anonymous group met in the Boys' Town city office and at other locations found by Dunlea. A bush camp for alcoholics and a residential 'Christmas House' (opened on Christmas Day 1945) both collapsed, which seemed to prove that a controlled environment was not the answer to alcoholism. Boys' Town fund-raising functions had sharpened Dunlea's own drinking problems and he came to recognize that he himself was an alcoholic. In 1950 he took a year's leave of absence to wander around Australia.

On his return, Dunlea became chaplain to the Matthew Talbot Hostel for destitute men. There his listening kindness was given full stretch. In 1952 he went to Hurstville as parish priest, devoting his time to A.A., to a new organization for people with psychiatric problems, Recovery Group, as well as to a menagerie of odd animals.

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