Enoch burke found guilty of contempt of court and committed to Mountjoy prison until he purges his contempt or until further order of the High Court.

39 comments

  3. Well on his way for becoming a martyr for those against “wokeism” or whatever the buzzword is these days and the far right. Hopefully won’t be offered a teaching position again

  7. Odds on a few more of his family getting arrested over this? Supposedly his father and brother were at the school today.

  12. “committed to Mountjoy prison until he purges his contempt”

    So he’s in prison until he stops holding the law of the land in contempt. That’s probably a life sentence for him.

  18. He’ll appear in Court on Wednesday looking like Nicholas Cage in Con Air.

    Double denim guitars screeching in the background. The works.

  19. Excellent.

    His “beliefs” do not trump the law of the land.

    His lack of respect for the agents of the state, suggests he’s unfit to act as an educator, and his ability to teach in the Irish school system should be revoked.

    If he wants to be woke like this, let him go to the US South, and stop pulluting the youth of the country with ideas about disobeying the courts. Whatever you feel about the rest of the State entities, everyone must respect the Court.

    It’s irrelevant that he’s disobeying his Principal due to his principles. It’s entirely relevant that he is disobeying a valid Court injunction.

    What a dumb bastard. Unfit to be a teacher.

  22. Can only imagine this guy was a psycho in the classroom as well probably tryna brainwash kids when he’s supposed to teach math or English or whatever 🤷🏻‍♂️

    Though I suppose before any1 suggests it no I haven’t seen any proof that he was forcing his opinions on students so I guess we can’t paint him with that brush 🤷🏻‍♂️🤣

  24. I’m going to do a proper thread about this tomorrow I think, but the misleading reporting, clickbait, and honestly borderline “fake news” around this story has genuinely surprised me and hugely dented any confidence I had in large parts of the Irish media. I thought our crowd were generally above rage-baiting as a revenue generating tactic, apparently not.

    The fact is that the pronouns issue has almost *nothing* to do with this story, why this teacher was suspended, why this court injunction happened and why he is now going to prison. Almost nothing. And yet Ireland’s entire media seemed to unite in milking the story by framing it as an issue of speech and pronouns, when in reality that, albeit being an aspect of his deteriorating relationship with the school, had almost nothing to do with any of the subsequent incidents.

    The guy was *not* suspended for refusing to refer to someone by particular pronouns, he was suspended for repeatedly harassing and haranguing other members of staff including the principal, going so far as to hijack events and publicly spar with them over the issue. Essentially this is a dispute over workplace bullying and harassment at its core. He was suspended after several such public spats with colleagues, the injunction was sought after he trespassed on the school grounds while under suspension, the contempt of court is because he continued to do so even after the court issued an injunction ordering him to desist from the aforementioned trespassing and harassment.

    The whole “teacher prosecuted for refusing to use gender neutral pronouns” thing is so, so, so far removed from the actual truth of this story that it seriously beggars belief that the Irish media spun it that way and almost nobody is calling them out on it.

    To give you an analogy, imagine for a moment that I kept harassing someone for cross-dressing in a nightclub, the bouncers asked me to leave, I refused, engaged them in a physical altercation when they tried to remove me, was abusive towards the Gardaí when they came to arrest me for trespassing and then disobeyed a judge who ordered me to stay away from the venue for X number of days by showing up there again the following Friday night and starting more fights with the bouncers, and was thus jailed for contempt of court.

    Now imagine the media spun it as “man jailed for transphobia on night out”.

    Whatever you think about the whole gender identity thing, the fact here is that it’s only tangentially relevant to this story as one of the reasons his dispute with his employer began initially. It has almost nothing to do with any of the subsequent escalations and disputes other than being the reason for an initial falling out, and is not the reason he was fired, ordered to stay away from the building or arrested for contempt of court.

    It’s quite alarming how easily the media managed to whip up a frenzy over this (no doubt generating massive ad revenues in the process) with so little blowback and so few people calling them out for inaccurate and sensationalist reporting. These aren’t tabloids we’re talking about, this is Ireland’s supposedly mainstream, respectable media. And they played the culture war type like a fiddle in order to generate a gigantic news story from what is in reality a very local dispute between a village clown and his workplace.

    Does anyone else see this as being as major a problem for our society as I do? Maybe this particular story is fairly inconsequential, but it makes you stop and wonder what other things over the years have been manipulatively reported in order to generate public interest, sacrificing accuracy and integrity in the process, and yet the media given a pass because “sure it’s the Irish Times / Independent / RTE / Journal, not a red top rag. They’d never do such a thing, they’re the *proper* journalists”.

    Whatever you think about this story, in my view this is a very, very serious problem, and one which could do with a lot more debate given how this story has played out over the last few weeks. If they can do this with a local employment dispute and stir up a frenzy with almost nobody noticing or commenting on it, they could do it with a major political scandal, with a national interest criminal trial, with a major business story, etc. This shit needs to be called out when it occurs, they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with manipulating public opinion and printing utterly inaccurate or deliberately misleading headlines without any blowback.

  27. So you can be sure he was likely happy to have this escalate as it did, likely feels he’s highlighting some massively systematic injustice. However I think he has massively underestimated how awful the joy is. Gone from the safety of his familial echo chamber and no longer in an environment that will indulge his peculiarities. He’ll be sharing landings with lads who won’t flinch to his tantrums and don’t mind throwing their weight around if he rubs them the wrong way. Be surprised if he doesn’t purge quite quickly.

  29. i mean, if anyone else in the country decided to have a verbal argument with their manager, one so odious that the courts said you can’t go to work until a review is carried out, and then continued to go to work to try prove you were right in defiance of the court, you’d be in the same trouble.

    All this case has done is feed this man’s martyr complex and highlight the erosion of journalistic standards in this country in a major way.

  32. This might be a silly question, but I’m not following the whole turning up for his time tabled hours thing. He seems to have turned up at the school and tried to teach a class the school had said he is was not teaching.

    Could the school not just have changed the time table? Or did they do that and he just turned up anyway and said *I normally take PE now, God damn it I’m taking PE* and tried to barge his way into the class room?

    He seems nuts and the whole thing is bizzare.

    Also isn’t that trespassing? Why have the school not fired him for gross misconduct

  34. So, does this mean he now has a criminal conviction? With a criminal conviction I doubt he would be able to pass Garda vetting and child protection, meaning he will never be able to teach again (hopefully).

  35. Does this mean he now has a criminal record? if so he can’t work with children anymore as they are classified as vulnerable individuals.

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