This week, when he was returned to Dublin’s Mountjoy jail for the third time in two years, Irish schoolteacher Enoch Burke was hailed by his many supporters as a martyr for free speech.
He was, according to some, a very modern victim of a tyrannical ‘woke’ establishment riding roughshod over an individual’s right to religious liberty.
The row between Burke, his school and the Irish state began in June 2022 when staff at Wilson’s Hospital School in County Westmeath were instructed by the head teacher that one of their students was transitioning and wanted to be referred to as ‘they/them.’
Burke, who comes from a well-known evangelical Christian family based in Mayo, refused that request and insisted that he would not bow down to this new ideology.
Given the fact that the student in question was not actually in any of Burke’s classes, where he taught History and German, it was a rather moot point. However, at a Church service attended by pupils and staff, Burke reportedly interrupted proceedings to insist that he would not be using these pronouns and objected to transgenderism in general.
Following the post-service meal, Burke followed the principal and publicly harangued her, prompting his suspension, pending a disciplinary hearing.
At this point in proceedings, it looked like a common or garden dispute between a teacher and his employer. But matters escalated when, despite his suspension, he continually appeared at the school and insisted on being allowed to take his classes – which resulted in the school taking out an injunction preventing him from teaching or entering the premises
And this is where things start to get really strange.
At the beginning of September 2022, Burke’s refusal to abide by the injunction saw him arrested for contempt of court. Despite being given ample opportunity by the judge, he refused to purge his contempt and was remanded to Mountjoy for the first time.
Speaking to the court, he insisted that he ‘would rather stay in prison every hour of every day for the next 100 years’ than comply with the order adding, as if anyone was in any doubt, that in this instance he would ‘only obey God,’ and ‘not obey man’.
Between September and December of that year, the curious case of Enoch Burke and his rather eccentric family of ten siblings (Ammi, Elijah, Enoch, Esther, Isaac, Jemima, Josiah, Keren, Kezia and Simeon) captured the nation’s imagination.
At every hearing, it seemed, at least one of his family would interrupt proceedings. In October, his mother Martina Burke was removed from the court after accusing the judge of being corrupt, while his sister, Ammi interrupted proceedings and shouted at the judge. This was a case that nobody, other than the Burke family and a strangely fascinated general public, seemed to relish.
Burke was, it’s fair to say, a most unusual prisoner. Rather than looking forward to his release, he seemed determined to stay locked up for as long as possible. He was eventually let go in December 2022 when the school had closed for the Christmas holidays.
As soon as the school reopened, however, he was back breaching the injunction and the contempt order and was once more arrested.
By this stage, it appeared that the family was enjoying the notoriety and publicity it was giving to their particular brand of evangelical Christianity.
In a now familiar routine, Burke repeatedly turned up outside the school and was repeatedly arrested. Then, in February, Enoch and Ammi made an unscheduled appearance at the High Court and directed a series of abusive comments towards the judge.
By this stage, the story had begun to receive international traction and things reached truly surreal heights later that month when Fred Phelps Jr, pastor of the notorious ‘God Hates Fags’ Westboro Baptist Church said that he felt the family had taken things too far and urged them to stand down.
The Westboro Baptist Church is best known for picketing the funerals of dead soldiers and taunting the grieving families that their loved one is rotting in hell. If they think you’ve taken things too far, surely that would give you pause for thought.
Instead, if anything, it emboldened the Burkes. At another hearing in March, when the Court of Appeal once more found against him, Ammi, Isaac, Simeon, Enoch himself, and the Burke parents, Sean and Martina, were all forcibly removed from the court by Gardai.
Simeon was subsequently remanded in custody for breach of the peace and, like his brother, refused to accept the offer of bail, forcing him to miss his King’s Inn law exams.
Further signs that the legal profession was losing patience came this June when Burke failed in a defamation case against the publishers of the Sunday Independent.
Unusually, the judge said that while the paragraphs that Burke complained about were indeed untrue, they did not cause any further damage to his reputation.
Any hopes that this might be the end of the matter were forlorn, however, and when the troublesome teacher was once more remanded to Mountjoy this week, the whole bandwagon just started rolling again This time there was even greater attention from media outlets in the US, the UK and across Europe.
Enoch even has celebrity supporters such as former Irish rugby international Simon Zebo (who hastily deleted a supportive Tweet on Wednesday following a backlash) and former footballer Joey Barton who plaintively cried on his social media: ‘How have the proud people of the UK and Ireland allowed this behaviour from elected officials to go unchecked?’
Of course, the reality is rather different to the perception. If any of Burke’s supporters bothered to venture past the headlines and actually acquainted themselves with the facts of this case, they would realise that this has absolutely nothing to do with someone’s refusal to use preferred pronouns.
Nor has it anything to do with transgenderism, freedom of expression or an individual’s right to religious freedom. If it was a case of someone being persecuted for refusing to bow down to the trans lobby and accept compelled speech against their own morals, then it would have been a scandal up there with the controversy that made Jordan Peterson famous eight years ago.
Instead, it’s a more grubby affair involving a religious crank who is using the state to fulfil his fantasies of becoming a martyr for his cause.
But while he may be a crank, he is far from stupid and he knows he has the Irish state where he wants it. After all, every time they chuck him back into Mountjoy for continuing to breach his court order, they continue to further his reputation as a lone soldier for Christ fighting against the forces of evil.
But if they choose to ignore him and allow him to breach that court order without consequences? Then it looks like he has beaten them. This deeply strange tale is far from over.
Comments