In Ireland - Four Gardai needed to arrest Enoch Burke

@UtopiaPlanitia
I’m going with 1. putting the literal fear of God into to them & 2. “spare the rod & spoil the child”.

As far as I understand it, the Burkes want to impose a form of Puritan religious law on everyone. They seem to labour under the misapprehension that they are above the law of the land, because God told them so.

Possibly a family-wide case of oppositional defiant disorder 🤷‍♀️

God only knows how the parents put smacht on them as kids if they were even half as thran as they are now.

The Burkes see everything through the lens of Pentecostalism. Everyone else has it wrong - including other Christians. There may be some other underlying cause for their fanaticism. Or causes. But ....I'm no psychiatrist.

I take your point @NitroNine and maybe you are right.

They certainly appear unpopular and for sure I would not have stood with them on the same sex marriage protest or against choice protest.
But on this issue I would. If I had a child at that school I reckon I'd be grateful someone was prepared to speak out.

Very few men are willing to make a principled and public stand on this issue, many because they cannot financially or emotionally afford to and many because they know in the current climate they'll get vilified to the back of beyond due to the degree of ideological capture. This is why Irish men like Graham Linehan and Andrew Doyle are so greatly appreciated in their willingness to do so by gender critical women.

Since I recently Googled the Burkes again, You Tube has sent me some of their shorts. It's clear they understand fully that pronouns are the thin end of the wedge and that this stuff matters.

I get that the optics of his/their campaign/protest aren't the best .
So much more could be said but I'll leave it there.

You’re welcome @TheSandgroper - if you’re not familiar with The Burkes you are fortunate indeed it’s easy to be taken in by line being pushed that he’s being persecuted by The Woke Mafia for taking a bold stand against gender ideology (etc). Rather than it just being more shameless-shameful shenanigans.

I have to say that's a superb paragraph in the Wiki article- when the head of the Westboro lot think you've 'gone too far', you're way past Dagenham.

Thanks @MarieDeGournay that is helpful.
I read from a report on Sky today that his case is in an ongoing appeal and so it's likely he is undermining his own case.
Maybe he is just going the full hair shirt/ most martyred of martyr's route.
Prison is no party though.

Thanks for that@DeanElderberry I have just done that and much of it I have seen before from a possible previous reading. I do find them somewhat intriguing as a family as have never come across their like before.

They are obviously highly educated and a huge amount of their collective energy appears to be used for campaigning. But I don't understand what their endgame is. I can't see that they are benefitting financially from their stance and am guessing they see themselves as moral crusaders with a mission to fight what they see as the good fight.
It could be that if I was living in Ireland and on the ground so to speak I might see the matter very differently and get where they are coming from and/or find them excessively litigious and extreme.

The point is, Villagetoraiseachild, that it just so happens that amongst the Burke's many beliefs, one of them happens to coincide with GC beliefs. I think I'm safe in saying that probably none of the rest of their beliefs coincide, and the way they choose to express their beliefs is hugely disruptive; they haven't been 'backed into a corner', they live in their own corner, and seem to come out disrupting whenever they do come out of their corner!

As a PP said, my enemy's enemy is not necessarily my friend, and the Burke Family are no friends to gender-critical feminists. So I hope The Countess would agree with Enoch Burke on the specific issue he had at work, but would not champion him more broadly.

The way to deal with his issue at work is through the appropriate channels, the employment tribunal.
The repeated court cases and jail time are about contempt of court, not his grievance with his employer. He could make it all stop tomorrow, and the carry on with his employment tribunal, but he chooses this performance instead.

I agree that the outcome of a Forstater-like appeal in an Irish court would be interesting..

Read the stuff on wikipedia about them. The gender issue is one tiny detail of the family policy of being above and outside the law (but trying to use it to advance their ends).

I can see how the Burkes would lose public sympathy over homophobia, absolutely. Totally understandable.

It's now clear in England that there are new legal precedents and great legal teams winning cases of unfair dismissal etc at employment tribunals, with many of these currently ongoing. Tide turning etc with regards protected beliefs, Maya Forester etc. Only relatively recently though.

Just wondering what alternative routes there would have been for EB in Ireland currently? Are there any similar cases where people have successfully appealed so far? Would The Countess have supported him, for example? Or are the Burkes just considered beyond the pale because of their particular kind of moral compass? They look like a family backed into a very hard corner.

Also just wondering if this is more nuanced/ complex than it looks.
Are the Burkes considered to be bad for the gender critical cause because of their hard line?
Bit nervous to even post this, but am in the spirit of sincere enquiry.
My experience of Ireland is it is deeply sensible in many matters, but we're all in interesting times.

Totes take your point, DeanElderberry, I was just on a roll..

It depends on the interview criteria, but a tick box for 'has the candidate been the subject a negative court finding after investigation for misconduct?' and a tick box for 'has the candidate made written public statements contrary to national law?' should have been enough to rule him out, even the that grim unsmiling visage didn't bump him down a few points on 'general impressions'.

As long as everyone they interviewed was put through the same hoops, there shouldn't have been a problem (but yes, I do know about mama Burke).

If schools don't take a little look at the legal history of people they're thinking of hiring, that - er - explains a lot, in view of what the government will be publishing soon.

All that being the case, why, having chosen to employ a new graduate with that track record established and on public record, did the school then decide to go head-to-head with the same employee and expect the state to pick up the costs of the entirely predictable fallout?
Very true, Dean, but...

'Well Mr Burke, we have looked at your application and find you eminently qualified for the post you are seeking to fill. However <peers nervously over half-glasses> it has been brought to the school's attention that your family are - and I trust you will forgive me lapsing momentarily into the demotic, Mr Burke - are, well... a bunch of disruptive attention-seeking loo-laas, and therefore you probably are too, so on that basis, it is with deep regret, Mr Burke, that we cannot offer you this position..'

Gosh, imagine the court-cases!

He is still being paid full teacher salary pending an Employment Appeal Tribunal hearing which is imminent.
Good point, I had forgotten that, halava. It wouldn't be a matter for the courts at all, it would be an EAT matter, if it wasn't for the constant breaching of court orders.

I feel the school should be expected to take some responsibility since they chose to hire him when it was known that he was problematic. Did they put a premium on someone who could grind his pupils through to maximum points or what?

He was removed from the school and sacked because he publicly abused the Head at a school dinner/board meeting and made a disgrace of himself. His sacking had nothing to do with his stance on transgenderism but because of his unlawful behaviour in the school. He was then suspended and injuncted from the school premises, but he breaks that injunction constantly, and is thus in contempt of court.

I do understand that the underlying issue led to his sacking, but if he hadn't, in true Burke Clan fashion - gone rogue, I suspect some compromise would have been reached. However, the Burkes don't do compromise, since the cult of the Burkes won't allow it.

He is still being paid full teacher salary pending an Employment Appeal Tribunal hearing which is imminent.

So my reading of it is that is was his obnoxious behaviour towards his superiors/employer that led to this pass. Not his views on transgenderism as such.

That would be very funny. It's clear that officialdom simply doesn't know what to do - the family act in ways so outside the norms that the law has no effective sanctions. Your strategy would probably be more effective and less expensive.

Enoch is at it again. Turned up at the school again, back in court again, back in prison again.. back in the headlines again, so job done✔

We all know he'll just turn up again at the school as soon as he's out, and arresting him isn't working, so maybe a different strategy is needed.

Make a feature of him! Give him all the attention he so desperately craves, in lorryloads! Make him a tourist attraction, a bit like the moving statues. Visit the school and take selfies with him. Local businesses could hire advertising space on the wall behind him. The school could bring him out a comfy chair and cups of tea. Passer-by could ask what he'd like from the local take-away as they were just heading that way themselves like. Knit him warm scarves and mittens in winter. At Christmas they could drape him in lights...

It's not really funny, but taking the piss out of the martyrdom performance might an attractive alternative to all the court and police time him and his family are intentionally and cynically consuming.

This is from Wikipedia - I've edited a few chunks out

In 2014, Isaac, Kezia, Ammi, and Enoch were all given lifetime bans from participating in student societies at the university they attended, [....] That year, [the] students' union held a referendum about implementing a strategy of boycott, divestment, and sanctions against the state of Israel.

The Burkes, who together occupied all four officer positions on the university's Christian Union Society, used society funds to print leaflets advocating for a "no" vote.[ ....] The university had previously received complaints from students surrounding the Burkes' distribution of leaflets which connected same-sex marriage to paedophilia and incest [.....] As a result of the investigation, on 10 November the four siblings were issued lifetime bans from participation in student societies

All that being the case, why, having chosen to employ a new graduate with that track record established and on public record, did the school then decide to go head-to-head with the same employee and expect the state to pick up the costs of the entirely predictable fallout?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burke_family_(Castlebar)#NUIG_religious_discrimination_challenge_(2014%E2%80%932021)

Anyone condoning Enoch Burke needs to do some seriously research on this family.

Awful, awful people and I’m sick of seeing them.

I have gender-critical views, but this isn’t as simple as “teacher cast out for not saying a boy has a vagina”.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

I apologise for referring to Enoch as 'Eugene'. Not sure where that came from.

@yesmen

That family are as bad as TRAs for making absolute [un]holy shows of themselves while steadfastly refusing to recognise other people exist & have rights.
(“Irish Examiner” of 14/02/23 gives a good picture of it.

I think Wilson's Hospital and Eugene Burke are pretty much equally to blame here, and that if the school and the state had ignored EB and let him carry out his one man protest through the winter he'd have found something else to do by now.

At the moment I think the law doesn't know what to do with them - there are good historical reasons for being very wary of the state locking people up because it disagrees with them, and this is problematic, however badly the Burkes en masse have behaved in this and all their other vexatious court cases.

For decades the Offences Against the State Act was used to lock people up on the sworn oath of a senior garda that they were members of an illegal organisation - usually the IRA or the INLA, though I presume if we had any members of loyalist gangs they were on the proscribed list too. There doesn't seem to be adequate law to deal with either people stirring up agitation on line, or with the Burke family, and I am not convinced that Helen McEntee's proposed hate legislation will help (and suspect a lot of doorstep criticism of that will be one factor in a November election).

A mess, but the gardai should stop dancing to either the Burke's or the school's tune.