Mick Clifford: The world tires of keeping up with the Burkes

 

Enoch Burke believes he is in prison for his beliefs. 

At the High Court hearing on Monday, to which he was brought in a paddywagon after being arrested, he told judge Michael Quinn that what he really wanted was to be in school, exercising his passion for teaching.

“I am a teacher,” he said.

“I want to be in my classroom today. That is where I was this morning when I was arrested.

“I love my school, Wilson’s Hospital School. Its motto being ‘res non verba’, ‘action and not words’. I am here today, judge, because I said I would not call a boy a girl.”

He is entitled to believe what he wants, but his analysis is wholly defective. Judge Quinn jailed him for contempt of court and he was sent to Mountjoy Prison simply because he believes his beliefs bestowed on him the right to harass the school principal to the extent that intervention was required.

Burke is from a Castlebar-based family of 10 that was homeschooled by their mother Martina. The family is evangelical Christian and all the children were given Biblical names. 

Collectively, the siblings have enough university degrees and post-grad qualifications to staff a university of their own. They have the wherewithal to use all the levers in society they might require in order to further their religious agenda if that is their desire. 

Instead, mother Martina and five of the siblings Enoch, Ammi, Isaac and Kezia, and Jemima, have at various points in recent years projected themselves in a way that is difficult to reconcile with any basic Christian values.

Jemima came to prominence in late 2020 when she had robust exchanges with the chief medical officer, Tony Holohan, at a Covid-19 press conference. Her questioning was described as “intemperate” and a video of it went viral, which may have been the objective. She claimed to have been representing a publication called The Western News, which does not exist.

She is Mayo-based but her attendance at the Dublin-based briefing came during an effective lockdown that banned all but the most necessary travel. It is unclear why she felt she was entitled to travel to the briefing and present herself as working for a publication that didn’t exist.

Last November, four of her siblings, Enoch, Ammi, Isaac and Kezia, lost a High Court action they had brought to challenge a lifetime ban from membership of college societies in NUI Galway some years previously. The siblings were members of the Christian Union Society (CUS) in the college and claimed the ban was discriminatory under the Equal Status Act on the grounds of religion.

Judge Raymond Groarke found there were procedural issues around the ban, but there were also “aggravating circumstances”. These included the failure of the siblings to co-operate with an investigation, their efforts to hinder it, their failure to give a truthful account of matters, their fabrication of accounts and their misuse of CUS funds.

There was no word from the family about how the siblings had managed, in the eyes of the court, to contravene some basic tenets of Christianity like honesty and probity.

Earlier this year, Ammi Burke was back in the news along with her mother. In November 2019, Ammi, a solicitor by training, had been dismissed from her job with leading law firm Arthur Cox. Family members picketed the office following the sacking. 

Last March, after delays for various reasons, a hearing over the dismissal began at the Workplace Relations Commission. Ammi objected to the adjudicating officer, saying he had connections to Cox’s counsel. The hearing continued but was repeatedly interrupted, first by Ammi and subsequently by her mother. In the end, the adjudicating officer threw out the case because it wasn’t possible to hear it.

Ammi Burke went to the High Court where the judge threatened to turn off her microphone if she didn’t stop interrupting. A decision from that action is due in the coming months.

The most recent fire was lit when Enoch refused to abide by a direction to address as “they” a child who was gender transitioning. The change of pronoun was at the request of the child, the child’s parents and was confirmed by school management.

Burke interrupted a church service at the school, which was attended by staff, clergy, pupils, parents, and board members, to voice his objection to acknowledging the transitioning student. 

The service was followed by a meal, at which Burke pursued the school principal on the issue, even after she walked away from him. As a result of those actions, he was suspended, an injunction to keep him away from the school was obtained, and he insisted on repeatedly breaking the injunction. That’s why he is in prison and there he will remain until he purges his contempt of court.

There is a thread running through all the incidents and allegations in which the named Burke siblings and their mother have been involved. 

In each case, they have strong opinions on an issue, usually dressed in the clothes of their Christian beliefs. In each case, they come to the belief that they are somehow victims and therefore entitled to conduct themselves outside accepted behaviour. 

At NUI Galway, their victimhood presumably forced the four siblings to act dishonestly, as ruled by the court.

At the WRC, casting the forum as being somehow corrupt allowed Ammi to present herself as a victim, justifying the disruption she and her mother caused, to the point where it was abandoned. And in school, poor victimised Enoch felt compelled to disrupt a function for parents and pupils in order that his victimhood be writ large.

Quite obviously, the siblings named above received an excellent academic schooling at home from their mother. They emerged with a sense of self-confidence that would make any teacher proud. 

One wonders, however, whether a little more effort should have been spent on subjects like civics, that they might have come to understand that when the world is not marching to your beat, it does not automatically follow that the world is out of step.