Who are the Burke family and why has Enoch Burke been arrested so many times?
Enoch Burke has been jailed yet again. (Getty/Canva/Twitter)
Irish teacher Enoch Burke, a member of the notorious Burke family, has been jailed yet again over his refusal to stay away from a school where he used to work.
Burke has, yet again, been sent to prison by a High Court in Dublin after failing to abide by an injunction won by officials at Wilson’s Hospital School where he used to work, barring him from turning up.
Burke has spent the last two years being repeatedly arrested for showing up at the school, which he was no longer allowed to enter, after he was suspended for aggressively confronting the head teacher over Burke’s refusal to use a 17-year-old trans student’s preferred name and pronouns.
His last appearance in court over his refusal to stay away from the school was disrupted by his family being forcibly dragged kicking and screaming out of the building.
The Burke family have since become infamous in Ireland and beyond for their anti-LGBTQ+ views, which are predicated on their fundamentalist evangelical Christian beliefs.
Enoch Burke has been jailed again after bring arrested at the school for breaching the injunction and stepping foot in the school three times at the time of reporting.
Following his latest breach, in which he entered the school grounds on Monday (2 September), he was ordered to return to Mountjoy prison.
His refusal to stay away from Wilson’s Hospital School and the disruption this has called has reportedly become so severe that the school board have sought to have him charged with contempt of court.
During his latest court appearance, Burke once again accused the court of breaching his religious right to be transphobic.
However, his religious rights do not allow him to violate a court order to stay away from a school.
Who are the Burke family?
The Burke family are notorious in Ireland for their religious and anti-LGBTQ+ activism, including interference in legal cases and consistently campaigning against LGBTQ+ rights.
They have been compared to the notorious anti-LGBTQ+ Westboro Baptist Church in the US, founded in 1955 by pastor Fred Phelps. Most of the members are part of the Phelps family. The church is infamous for its public protests against gay people and for its usage of the phrase “God hates fags”.
Hailing from Castlebar, County Mayo in Ireland, the family consists of parents Martina and Sean Burke and their ten children – Ammi, Elijah, Enoch, Esther, Isaac, Jemima, Josiah, Keren, Kezia, and Simeon.
Their anti-LGBTQ+ campaigning has been an ongoing public issue since at least 2008 and has involved protests opposing same-sex marriage, harassing LGBTQ+ politicians, and much more.
Enoch Burke has been at several of these protests, including a picket protest outside St. James’s Hospital in which he spouted conspiracy theories about LGBTQ+ people and HIV/AIDS, and has been banned from the University of Ireland (NUIG) for comparing homosexuality to paedophilia.
Enoch’s sister, Jemima Burke, was arrested in June for breaching a public order incident after she was seen running down Market Street in Swinford recording witnesses of an ongoing inquest into a patient who died at Mayo University Hospital.
The tirade was reportedly part of a Covid-19 denial campaign that Jemima and the rest of the Burkes had engaged with. Burke was previously recorded questioning Irish chief medical officer Tony Holohan, claiming she was representing a newspaper that has been defunct for several years.
The family routinely uses religious rights discrimination laws to justify their actions, despite many of their appearances in court being related to separate incidents such as public order breaches.
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