The annual summer holidays are now in flow right across Europe, something which can often seem like something close to an escape from prison for children and teachers alike. One particular educator out there who may experience such emotions upon a rather more intense and elevated plane than most of his peers, however, is a man named Enoch Burke, who was recently released from Ireland’s Mountjoy Prison in Dublin, where he spent over 400 days behind bars.
In our progressive modern era of ‘compassion’ within the criminal justice system (for the criminals, not their victims), Mr. Burke surely must have done something pretty serious to have ended up confined to a cell amongst thieves and murderers for more than 365 calendar days? Not especially, no. Quite why Enoch lost his freedom depends upon who you ask, and how you look at it.
If you ask the judge who sentenced him, the answer would be contempt of court due to Burke’s repeated failure to comply with an official court order. If you ask Burke himself, he would say he had been locked up just for refusing to refer to a transgender pupil by the fake pronoun ‘they’ instead of the more biologically accurate ‘he’, which Burke viewed as him being forced to publicly affirm the heretical doctrine of transgenderism whilst simultaneously repudiating his own more sincerely held doctrine of Christianity.
Technically, this latter interpretation is, on precise legal grounds, incorrect. Yet, in pure common-sense terms, it is self-evidently what in effect has happened, and is certainly how the majority of the general Irish public have tended to interpret the case – everywhere, that is, outside of the present, ostentatiously post-Christian, Irish governing class.
Enoching On Heaven’s Door
The story began in 2022, when Burke was suspended from his role teaching History and German at Wilson’s Hospital School, a Church of Ireland (i.e., Protestant) boarding school in County Westmeath. One male student had recently declared himself to be transgender, wanting to be known by both a new faux female name and the pronouns they/them, something the school now appeared to be mandating for all staff, because that’s the kind of ‘tolerant’ dictatorship we all now live in.
Unfortunately for school managers, Burke belonged to a large and prominent family of fundamentalist Evangelical bent, who were well-known for their community proselytising and involvement in various lawsuits, to the arguable point of being obsessive. Therefore, Enoch was unlikely to just knuckle down and quietly let the issue drop.
During a school chapel-service, Burke openly confronted the school’s then-principal, Niamh McShane, refusing to stop pressing her upon the subject until others intervened and she simply left. As a result of this behaviour – which some would call ‘harassing’, but others would say was principled and brave – Burke was suspended and told to stay away from the school estate. However, as Burke didn’t think he had done anything wrong, he refused to accept there were any justifiable grounds for him to be suspended from his job at all, so simply decided to continue turning up in class for lessons every day whether his employers wanted him to or not, in a kind of ‘reverse detention’ arrangement.
An injunction was then sought by the school to compel Burke to stay away from the premises whilst they decided how best to bloodlessly martyr him, but he kept on refusing to comply, leading to him being hauled up and charged with contempt of court. But Enoch didn’t care, saying he had an obligation to “only obey God” and “not obey man”, the transgender agenda blatantly contradicting Holy Scripture. Were his actions unwise? Was his attitude unreasonable, extreme, and excessively stubborn? Some may say so, but then so were the actions and attitudes of the school who had tried to make him publicly call someone with a penis a girl in defiance of all known biological reality.
Repeated non-compliance with the injunction led to Enoch being remanded in Mountjoy Prison for contempt of court, whilst racking up €140,000 in fines by the beginning of the 2023/24 academic year: €700 for every day he turned up outside the school gates to stare wistfully inside before being incarcerated, potentially indefinitely. Bizarrely, it seems the only time Ireland’s judges are now happy to allow this hazardous offender free from Mountjoy is during the school holidays, when there are no students in the school for him to ‘endanger’ by his very presence there – hence his current (presumably temporary) state of liberty for the summer.
As Burke once lamented, he could either be “a Christian in Mountjoy Prison” or “a pagan acceptor of transgenderism outside it”. But, very tellingly, it seems the Irish legal establishment completely failed to understand Burke’s motivations here.
In a December 2023 ruling, presiding Judge Brian O’Moore expressed the view that the “only plausible interpretation” of Burke’s actions was that he was “exploiting his imprisonment for his own ends” to gain fame as otherwise he would surely have “taken the opportunity to bring it to an end” by meekly capitulating. Yes, that could be the “only plausible interpretation” to a judge in the now aggressively secularised nation of Eire – the very idea Mr. Burke may actually have been acting from sincere religious motives was clearly completely ridiculous and unthinkable.
Enoch Ardent
It seems Mr. Burke’s former students had a more mature understanding of his reasons than their adult ‘betters’ did. According to Burke’s own 2023 testimony, whilst maintaining his lonely vigil outside the school gates, he was mobbed by senior students “wanting me to sign their shirts, wanting autographs, wanting pictures and wishing me well.” As he then added, “I think it’s very regrettable in our country that children have a greater conscience and a greater grasp of right and wrong than the judge in the chair that’s getting paid €250,000 [in salary, not bribes from Mermaids]. I think that’s a very sad state for our country to be in.” So do I.
Also more understanding of Burke’s plight were his fellow prisoners in Mountjoy Prison – not that you would have known it from Irish media coverage. This June, Enoch lost yet another court case, this time a defamation lawsuit brought by himself against Irish newspaper The Sunday Independent, who had falsely claimed Burke had annoyed fellow felons so much by his constant preaching of the Gospel that he was moved to a different wing for his own safety, lest they beat him up.
If Burke lost his defamation case, this must mean the newspaper’s story was true, right? Wrong. In fact, other prisoners had sympathised with their new inmate, telling him they agreed with him, that “you should not be in here”, and to “keep [your] head up” before leaving gifts of popcorn and biscuits at his cell door. In Ireland, the criminals are now more morally sane than the judges.
During the defamation hearing, the judge, Justice Rory Mulcahy, agreed that, whilst Burke had indeed been moved to another cell, this was purely for mundane logistical reasons, not to protect him from violence, and that the press story had been completely untrue, all of which was “unfortunate”. And yet still, Mulcahy ruled in the newspaper’s favour; on 18 July, Enoch was even ordered to pay the publisher’s legal costs.
How come? Because, under Ireland’s Defamation Act 2009, to count as actually being defamation, public statements have to not only be demonstrably untrue, but also to materially injure the plaintiff’s reputation “in the eyes of a reasonable member of society”. And who counts as being “a reasonable member of society” in the eyes of Irish law these days? Certainly not a lunatic, bigoted old Christian, who swans around the land openly disagreeing with the new, State-ordained dogma that ‘trans women are women’!
Whilst admitting Irish case law did explicitly state that even a previously blemished reputation could be further injured by the making of new false allegations – calling Hitler a paedophile, for example – Mulcahy expressed the view that “The suggestion that [Burke] severely annoyed his fellow prisoners by the repeated expression of his religious beliefs is … a whisper in the hurricane of noise which his [previous] actions … created.”
I’m no legal scholar, but it seems to me the basic layman’s translation of these words would be something like ‘Thanks to prior biased media coverage, the general public already thought Mr. Burke was a religious nutcase, so falsely claiming all the other prisoners thought he was one too wouldn’t make any difference to his general negative perception in the eyes of the world.’ To those post-religious ‘right-thinking’ souls who now control Ireland, Enoch Burke’s public reputation could not possibly sink any lower than it already was – after all, he’s a known Christian.
Enoch Was Right!
Whilst actually an Evangelical Protestant, by adopting such a principled public religious stance on anti-trans issues, Burke still stands in as a handy proxy for the supposedly ‘outmoded’ and soon-to-be-abolished moral values of old Catholic Ireland, traditionally the most religious and Rome-influenced nation in Western Europe, at least until the sudden secular liberal revolution which occurred there from the 1990s onwards when they started handing out condoms, divorces, dildos, amyl nitrate and abortions like confetti and claiming Father Ted was a documentary series.
Supposedly, this was all done in the name of ‘increasing tolerance’ – but in practice, it seems to have been done far more with the aim of dismantling normative Irish society wholesale in mind, something which could never be done without taking on its traditional normative religion first. Those who run twenty-first century Ireland in the supposed name of tolerating the endlessly diverse lifestyles of all the nation’s many and varied citizens seem to have one main exception to this rule: sincere Christians like Enoch Burke.
Given they were clearly being attacked by proxy like this, what was the response of the Catholic Church in Ireland to Burke’s plight? In one short word, ‘risible’. The Vatican’s leader there, Eamon Martin, Archbishop of Armagh, had only this to say about the situation when quizzed by journalists in 2023:
I’m very saddened … Clearly, what we are talking about here is this man’s very strong personal beliefs, but also a school has to deal with the management and with the disciplinary issues, and I wouldn’t want to get into that because I wouldn’t be very familiar with the reasons why [this has happened] from all sides. Clearly this has been going through the law… [and is] complex legally and in all other ways… I’m aware from conversations with those involved in Catholic schools that issues to do with gender identity, issues to do with sexual orientation, have already become quite common within our schools and are being dealt with very gently, and pastorally, and sensitively within the pastoral programs of those schools.
Why are such subjects being dealt with in supposedly ‘Catholic’ [sic] schools at all? Do you reckon they’re being “dealt with very gently” in Ireland’s madrassas, Archbishop Martin?
Pathetic, mealy-mouthed, equivocating moral cowardice: just because the Archbishop is himself yet another grown man who goes around wearing a big silk dress in public, it doesn’t mean he should start pandering to his more emotionally disturbed and gleefully anti-Christian queer peers in this respect.
School of Hard Enochs
And, now, it seems this whole plague is spreading across the Irish Sea towards the British mainland. Former Christian Maths teacher Joshua Sutcliffe, who was barred from his role at an Oxford school after accidentally saying “well done girls” to a group of female students, one of whom delusionally self-identified as being male when she wasn’t, has just lost his appeal against being struck off as a registered teacher by the UK’s Teaching Registration Agency (TRA) at the High Court – Peter Sutcliffe may have got off lighter.
“I still stand by my Christian convictions that it is harmful and detrimental to affirm gender-confused children,” said Sutcliffe following his unsuccessful appeal. “This is the belief I am fighting for which is shared by not only Christians but many who do not believe in harmful transgender ideology. I have been a marked man ever since I dared to express my Christian beliefs in a school.” He should have just said he was expressing the beliefs of Islam about queerness in the name of spreading religious tolerance, plurality, and inter-faith dialogue, to see what the TRA would have done to him then. (Or maybe not. In 2019, Joshua was forced to resign – i.e., sacked, but in Newspeak – from another school after criticising the Religion of Peace on YouTube.)
Sutcliffe’s lawyers had argued, not unreasonably, that there was no actual legal obligation upon any teacher to call a child by the fake pronoun of their own disturbed choosing, hence his treatment by the TRA was in itself unlawful. According to the presiding judge, however, “Just because misgendering a transgender pupil might not be unlawful, does not mean that it is appropriate conduct for a teacher,” and that instead, as a qualified pedagogue, Mr. Sutcliffe had an alleged professional duty to “respect and celebrate the pupils’ personal autonomy” in such matters. I thought it was only Stonewall who got to interpret the law as being what they wanted it to be, as opposed to what it actually is?
So far, it seems to have been mainly Christian teachers who have been prominently punished and persecuted for classroom heresies against the trans cult: but it won’t end that way. Most likely they’re just the ones who, having the strongest public moral belief-systems, happen to have stuck their heads up above the parapets first. Once other, non-believing, educators and school employees try to resist, they too will surely be dealt with in the same contemptuous and dismissive manner. As Mr. Sutcliffe warned following his lost appeal, “every teacher is at risk” if they dare share their personal beliefs in class now – unless, of course, their personal beliefs happen to be loony far-Left ones about children’s vaginas magically being able to be redefined as penises.
So, whilst Enoch Burke himself may often come across as a rather obstreperous, uncompromising and cantankerous fellow, whose overall Evangelical belief-system neither I, nor you, may well agree with, he has nonetheless done us all a huge favour by standing up to be countered in the way he has done against the malign arrayed forces of the Irish Unfree State: his public martyrdom has engendered much public sympathy worldwide, and helped illustrate to many appalled citizens who otherwise might not have been paying very much attention just what unbelievable levels of intolerance in the name of tolerance we are up against with these people.
When it comes to resisting the overreaching diktats of the Rainbow Reich these days, it seems to me we could all do far worse than to take a leaf or two from the Book of Enoch.
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Why not simply ban all clothes, phones, accessories, shoes, food, drinks associated with the petro-chemical industry in any way? Okay, there will be a fair few chilly, hungry and thirsty people but they won’t be associating themselves with The Evil Capitalists!
Incidentally, the ban should include the musicians instruments, all wind and solar power since anything that, in any way whatsoever, is associated with Fossil Fuels is The Great Evil of the day. I somehow think the Eco Warriors won’t be quite so keen to lose their gadgets in order to Save The World.
Obviously they also must be able to prove they walked all the way to the venue and did not walk on any tarmac, brick or paving.
The world’s gone batsh*t f*in crazy. Looking forward to my deathbed to get some peace from the asylum.
Not yet Lemming. Do not go quietly…
How does the upvote work on this one? An agreement that the world’s lost the plot, or an agreement that a Lemming funeral would be rather good? Surprised I haven’t had more up-votes! Even the usual double-act have let me down!
Uptick for the first sentence not the last.
Be careful what you wish for.
.
“True gent”
In the name of ‘cultural appropriation’ ban anyone from elsewhere from wearing any western clothing. Native dress only for our foreign visitors. No denim jeans for them. Saris only for our Indian female residents. No Nike trainers for our African residents. Only Kimonos for our Japanese visitors.
To take it to its absurd conclusion, no western inventions can be used either. No electricity, no TV, no computers.
We must never ever use chopsticks for eating Chinese food, nor must we ever again use the numeric system originally derived by Arab scholars.
Drop all English words derived from other languages, including words influenced by the Vikings, the Romans, the Normans, the Neanderthals and the proto-hominids…
Loopy thinking.
Offense isn’t given, it’s taken.
my thoughts exactly, its the Lefts way of creating constant division and hatred so that they can divide and conquer.
If you’re not Chinese, you shouldn’t be eating Chinese food. Cultural appropriation, don’cha know.
“They include “clothing/garments/items which promote cultural appropriation”.
So, jeans, cowboy boots and stetsons all banned. Each item specifically developed for the cowboy / rancher lifestyle.
Hmm. Not the sharpest knives in the drawer.
What happens if somebody turns up and is denied entrance on the grounds they are wearing a proscribed item yet there is no list of what is and is not proscribed and for and by whom?
Could an English man, or girl wear an Akubra hat or a Davey Crockett “coonskin” hat – oh that could be fun…
What’s that on your head?
‘A coon.’
Completely unenforceable and would doubtless infringe on yuman rights.
Other than causing trouble, upset, division and mindless aggravation what is this intended to achieve?
Obviously the sensible approach is to avoid marxist festivals or blatantly defy the vague guidelines and turn up ready for aggro.
if we take it to its conclusion will they ban black women who have straight hair extensions and blonde hair?, will they ban middle eastern women from wearing anything but the Hijab? will indian women be made to wear Saris?
What about the food supplied? will the ethnically British be only allowed to cook and eat Roast Beef and Fish and chips? meanwhile each race only allowed to eat and cook culturally appropriate dishes? What about the Trans men who puport to be women, will they be refused entrance because they have appropriated womens clothing?
Or is it as I suspect that the White ethnicity people will be the target of re education and bullying?
A fine example of how to create hatred and division between people by forcing them into the vituous lefts defined boxes of which you must fit and comply and if you refuse they will destroy you.
Potatoes came from the Americas, didn’t they? Chips are out.
What the hell is ‘cultural appropriation’?
I dont understand
What if one was mixed race?
How would you be expected to dress?
Say you were half Scottish and half Dutch would turning up to said festival painted blue wearing just clogs be appropriate?
So meaningful
I presume the Festival will also be banning the “cultural appropriation” of eating foreign foods.
So the Indian, Thai, Chinese, Jamaican, American etc food outlets must be restricted to customers with those origins.
For the Brits, it’s fish n chips, bangers and mash, pies or pasties. And none to be served to those who are obviously not ethnic Brits.
Does this include men dressed as women?