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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Thank you for the concise summary of their cases. I applaud them for sticking to their principles in the face of cruel and unprincipled opposition.
I’m not Christian but I was brought up in the tradition and I feel it’s worth defending.
The Christian faith is clearly under attack as we’ve also seen from the Olympic opening ceremony. Ably abetted by the quisling leaders in the upper echelons of the CofE and Catholic churches.
The Olympic furore could conceivably turn out to be a high-water mark rather than another institution that has fallen. The IOC may have given in, but there is now a much more extensive and bloody fight going on in the pubs rather than in secret disciplinary hearings. The World Boxing Organisation seems to be taking a stand, but can expect to receive a number of punches. Doubtless popcorn will be sold for any courtroom spat between an XY athlete in a women’s ranking and any organisation for which that combination disqualifies that athlete from women’s matches.
O/T-ish: I don’t if it has been tested in the courts or even the TRA, but Denying The Dogma of Anthropogenic Global Warming around 2004 was a very risky occupation for a teacher in the UK. It wasn’t that doing so was exactly illegal, but somehow anyone who did not salute the AGW flag found that all manner of caltrops were strewn in their career path, in the form of vaguely-worded allegations about not embracing one of some 33 (?) standards expected of teachers’ behaviour, whether in or out of school, or whether in class or on social media. The application of these was erratic, in that teacher A who was, say, notorious for mild alcohol problems would escape notice so long as he/she/they taught Global Warming (as it was then known) as Settled Science. Conversely teacher B would be regularly reprimanded for “wearing a loud shirt” (I exaggerate) if they were not 110% supportive of the AGW narrative and preferably members of the Socialist Workers Party. It became obvious what the real charge was, and indeed what the pattern was: if you did not conform to the agenda of the New World Order (far-left, Climate, Gender, WHO…) you would be harassed out of post by attrition of finances defending against vexatious allegations. This Blair legacy was left unchallenged throughout the years of the Conservative regime. Logically it has now reached the XX/XY debate and will doubtless be expanded and enforce by Starmer, probably next time we have a vax/novax debate or another confected monkeypox scare. Resistance is Futile! Upticks/sharing of “legal but harmful” comments will result in cancellation!
How do Physics teachers manage in such schools?
Is it Monday, Wednesday and Friday it’s Climate Science, and on Tuesday, Wednesday (and Saturday), it’s Classical Mechanics, for real?
Strangely, the GCSE Biology books include experiments on photosynthesis, which show for example how more carbon dioxide makes plants grow faster, up to a certain point. “Don’t mention the carbon dioxide, Polly. I did once, but I think I got away with it.” Fortunately its only one point or so in an exam, so I used to say “here is the official answer, but reality…” . Kids understand how Doublethink works and can cope with it. Unfortunately our MPs work to a different a system which does not allow Doublethink in the general population and may even not realise their own delusional thinking.
Physics, like all of GCSE science textbooks, parrot the official NASA line on “trapping infra-red rays, like a duvet” and have drawings of the mythical “carbonosphere”, as though it as real as the ionosphere but “reflects” long wavelength infra-red. Again, it is fortunately only one point in an exam, and the kids are told what to put down to get it.
Compared to Science, the situation is less contentious at the chalkface than in Geography and especially History, where any dissent from the Official Line on colonialism and migration is likely to be met with more than just losing one mark in a test.
Fortunately I escaped before the XY debate escalated! So far as I know, there are still only two explicit diagrams in GCSE biology on the subject, one labelled “male”, the other “female”, plus some binary narrative on hormones.
Well once the world has agreed a consensus on all science then there is no longer any need for traditional evidence-based science teaching.
I look forward to a Muslim teacher in a secular school being similarly hounded. The school governors might need protection.
think of the hypothetical case of a Muslim girl at a Muslim school claiming to be a boy and therefore entitled to be educated. How would you rate their chances in the school or at law.
An excellent depressing but also deeply inspiring piece.
The battle lines are drawn, the dogs of cultural war are panting at the leash.
So let us rhetorically of course (far be it from me (to the cunts from the 77th)) cry havoc, and “bring it on”.
And by the way, who the fuck is Allah?
Steir Karmers Boss !
You mean Kir Steir Karmer. Have some respect for the Monrachy!
History has various martyrs for various causes & this man with an unforgettable Christian name will soon be one
we need a synchronised “I’m Spartacus” moment where we all go on Facebook & declare that The King has no clothes !
Did you have any particular king in mind?
Burger ….?
And Kier Hardy would turn in his grave!
Excellent. Thank you for speaking out – and thank you Enoch.
You may not agree with his views but this gentleman is certainly brave and takes his faith seriously.
Our faith will save us yet.
I speak as a non church goer with increasingly deeply held Christian beliefs.
Ultimately our faith will save us because there will be nothing else left to save us.
Every other attempt to find a solution to mankind’s problems, every single ideology, -ism, will fail.
Like the Soviet Union – all that effort, human sacrifice, 20 million dead, and for what?
Another good Steyn article on the riots and two tier Kier
https://www.steynonline.com/14541/farewell-leicester-square
I know one thing for certain; I will never call anything, be it a spade, a person in a dress, or anything else, anything other than what it is. When lies become the truth we are seriously in trouble and, let’s face it, we are up to out necks in trouble because there are too few like this man.
“Tolerance will reach such a level that intelligent people will be banned from thinking so as to not offend the imbeciles”
Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821 to 1881)
How can a biology teacher teach genetics today?
They can’t, unless they teach something completely different. This has been happening in science classes for years, one of the major reasons why there are very few Hard Science graduates any more (or Engineers!), to the extreme detriment of the Country.
Now change Enoch’s name to Mohammed and his faith from Protestant Christian to Fundamentalist Islam ….. and imagine him receiving the same employment and legal treatment.
Two-Tier “justice” is operating in Ireland, just as it is in the UK.
So if the child declares itself to be a Cat must the teacher address it as Tiddles, allow them to sleep through the lessons and urinate in the plants? As to do otherwise under this Judge would command a Prison sentence. One can only hope if this Judge has children and Grandchildren that those children play every gender/animal/object as their true selves and if he dare to not agree that young matilda is indeed a surgeon and allow her to operate upon all and sundry he will be sentenced for the same crime.
The world has gone mad, and the Christian God has been declared the enemy and that’s in Ireland!
“It’s not against the law, but I’ll find you guilty nevertheless, because I’m the judge here!”
Outdoing this kind of travesty will be difficult.
There is a problem with this analysis.
It is internally inconsistent.
If as this article suggests the reverse was true of the newpaper’s allegation and that the other prisoners held Enoch Burke in high regard for his stand then Burke’s reputation was not tarnished at all but a good reputation.
So Judge Mulcahy, as a judge and experienced lawyer, would have known his position in his judgement is completely wrong and unjust but as we can see, according to this article, he did it anyway.
Unfortunately this kind of corruption is also seen on a daily basis in British Courts.
If it were not so there would have been no Post Office scandal over miscarriages of justice and Lucy Letby would not have been prosecuted, let alone found guilty.
And look at the prison sentences handed down recently for online hurty words when burglars with less that 100 convictions don’t get gaol time and knife offenders with less than 15 also don’t.
It is a bent bent bent world we sadly are involuntary prisoners of on these islands.