Enoch Burke has been jailed for a third time after returning to Wilson’s Hospital School, despite a judge’s ban. The school had expelled him after refusing to recognise a trans student’s gender reassignment.
Back to prison. For the third time since 2022, former German and history teacher Enoch Burke returned to Mountjoy Prison in Dublin on Monday, where he has already spent more than 400 days in detention, after returning to Wilson’s Hospital School in the Irish county of Westmeath. The teacher had been expelled from the establishment in 2022, after a conflict with the principal who criticized his attitude towards a transgender student. In the name of his religious values, Enoch Burke had refused to comply with the student’s request and to use his new first name and the new pronoun by which the student wanted to be referred to after his gender transition.
This Monday, September 2, for the third time, Enoch Burke went to Wilson’s Hospital School despite a court order prohibiting him from approaching the school that suspended him. He spoke with journalists present on site, because his case has been widely publicized for three years; and in particular those from Sky News who report snippets of exchanges held with the teacher before his arrest by the Irish police. Enoch Burke thus indicated that he considered that his dismissal from the establishment was not valid, because the appeal procedure is not finished, and indicated that he was still paid as a teacher. He therefore went to the school despite the ban issued by a judge, “to do [s]we have to”that is, to teach.
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The professor added that he never refused to teach a student, whoever they were, but that he had refused to “betray [s]religious beliefs by declaring [s]has faith in transgender ideology”considering that the school’s injunction to refer to the trans student by his new first name and pronoun contravened his rights and religious freedom.
Arrested by police and brought before a judge at the High Court in Dublin, after images of him wandering outside the school building went viral on social media with mocking comments, Enoch Burke, who says he is an evangelical Protestant, again mentioned his Christian faith to explain his behaviour to the court. However, Judge Michael Quinn considered that the facts judged consisted only of the failure to comply with the ban he had been given to approach the school building, and ordered the immediate imprisonment of the teacher, who had been released in June before serving his full sentence.
