Fergus Finlay: Queen's death and jailing of Enoch Burke reveals worst of Twitter

Enoch Burke, centre, arriving at the High Court from Mountjoy Prison. His refusal to use the pronoun that one of his students wanted is absolutely inexplicable. Picture: Collins Courts

It’s hard to imagine anything in the world that Britain's Queen Elizabeth and Enoch Burke could possibly have in common. But actually, there were two things. They both dominated the news cycle nationally and globally. And they both managed to drive the world of Twitter mad.

Twitter is a mad world anyway. Every time you post something you have to be prepared to see your reputation torn to shreds, your personality mocked, your intellect (such as it is) questioned and dismissed, and your appearance jeered at. There’s the other side to social media of course — and that’s what I value — it can be a great place to start a decent discussion about stuff, even the occasional lively argument.

But it is extraordinary how the power to stick whatever you like up there can go to some people’s heads. Big events in particular can make social media an ugly place, where the most extreme views can often dominate and where hatred can be spewed.

There can be few bigger events, of course, than the death of Queen Elizabeth. I admit I was surprised at how moved I was by her sudden slipping away. The whole story will be told in time, I suppose, but it was genuinely shocking that one day she was doing her duty by seeing Boris Johnson off the premises and greeting Liz Truss as her new Prime Minister. She looked frail in the pictures but she was upright and smiling. Then suddenly her family was summoned to her bedside. It was as if she had decided she had two more duties to do and that would be enough.

She was a woman of duty, there’s no doubt about that. Martin Luther King used to talk about how easy it was to lead with a megaphone in your hand and battalions at your back. And how much harder it was to lead by serving. Queen Elizabeth was and saw herself as a servant of the people and a servant of the weird British constitution. 

That seemed to make her frequently tough and unyielding in some of her relationships, but she could never ever be accused of letting her people down.

Like many other Irish people, I have a memory of meeting her, when she made that historic visit to Dublin, at the reception in the Guinness Storehouse. 

Britain's Queen Elizabeth in the Gravity Bar at the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin.

We were all gathered in little pods, and I was with Mandy (who was the only woman with Down’s Syndrome in the room). The Queen smiled really warmly at Mandy, and held her hand rather than shook it. I was introduced as the CEO of Barnardos and she twinkled up at me and said “I’m your patron then”. I gabbled something about Barnardos in Ireland being independent but that we were proud of the fact that the founder of both organisations was a Dubliner. She twinkled again and was gone.

But apart from her personal qualities and the impact she had as a major world personality, you had a very strong sense that her death was a genuinely historic moment. Even if the tectonic plates didn’t move, you could certainly begin to hear them creak.

The kingdom over which Elizabeth reigned is a deeply divided place. It’s divided north and south, it’s divided by poverty, it’s divided by increasingly strong nationalist instincts, and it’s divided perhaps most of all by Brexit. 

Brexit has brought out the very worst in some attitudes — the desire to control borders, for instance, has led the country into the unbelievable process of trying to send some of the most oppressed people in the world to Rwanda.

The country still hasn’t recovered from Covid-19, and there will undoubtedly be more scandalous revelations about how public money was misused throughout that period. And its entire population is under terrible pressure, which can only get worse, because of the energy crisis. Its government is distrusted and its governing party is at odds with itself.

A country like that needs strong cement to hold it together. Elizabeth was, invisibly, that cement — the only problem is, they may not have known how much they needed her until she was gone. Her successor will do his absolute best, but he will struggle to carry the nation on his back the way Elizabeth did.

This is why you’d think that somewhere on social media, you’d find reflection. And there is some. But it’s outweighed enormously by all the contempt and bile — not for Queen Elizabeth, except in a small number of cases, but for the rest of her family.

Tabloids attack

You can see readily enough that the bile is led by some of Britain’s tabloid newspapers — surely some of them have long ceased to earn the word newspaper being applied to them — and by some of its most rancid commentators, the likes of Piers Morgan. A lot of it — especially the vilest and most racist bits — is aimed at Meghan Markle.

You’d want to be a lot more knowledgeable than me (or the racists) to know the truth behind the attacks. But actually, there are too many social media warriors who have no interest in the truth. They’re just happy to besmirch the memory of a monarch to whom unity meant a lot by spreading as much disunity and division as they can.

It had only one plus to it. It wiped Enoch Burke off the news and off social media, at least for the moment. And to use a word he might choose, that was a blessing.

Let me declare my position. I suspect (I have no way of knowing for sure) that Enoch Burke is a well-qualified and diligent teacher. I suspect he’s also one of those teachers who would be quite offended if any of his students called him anything but Mr Burke. 

I find his behaviour in refusing to use the pronoun that one of his students wanted absolutely inexplicable. And I can see no Christianity in his behaviour towards his colleagues or his students.

I also think the school played into his hands. I have the utmost sympathy for the position in which they found themselves. But to be honest, if he wanted to sit in an empty classroom for the duration of his normal working day, I’d have locked him in and opened the door when the school bell rang for students to go home.

Facts replaced by prejudice

But the school did what they had to do, and Twitter went mad. More or less equally divided, but the pile-on in his support, as a latter-day Christian martyr, was something to behold. 

One person whom I used to respect tweeted gibberish to the effect that this was going to happen to all of us when hate legislation became law. Facts were replaced by prejudice — especially anti-trans prejudice — and the truth of this man’s carry-on was ignored.

The fact is that social media — and especially Twitter — can’t deal with big stuff. It sets out to trivialise, and that enables people (especially when they can be anonymous) to use it as a platform for bile and nothing else. Not for the first time, it’s long past time that it had some basic rules of decency, and some regard for truth, forced on it.