Mick Clifford: It's time to stop giving the Burkes what they want
Enoch Burke outside Wilson's Hospital School earlier this month, in direct defiance of a court order. Picture: Colin Keegan/Collins
At some point this month officials from the Department of Finance and the Attorney General’s office are due in the High Court to explain themselves. They are to tell Judge David Nolan how exactly they propose to collect over €193,000 owing to the State in fines from Enoch Burke.
That figure has increased in the last week with every day that Mr Burke maintains his stubborn vigil at the gates of Wilson’s Hospital School in Westmeath.
Last month, Judge Nolan released Mr Burke from prison, where he has spent around 500 days in the last two years. This was the second Christmas that a member of the judiciary saw fit to let the lad out of prison to go home for a feed of turkey.
Implicit in the ruling was a hope that he might use the festive season to reconsider and once the holidays were over desist from haunting the Westmeath school on a daily basis. No such luck.
At that hearing on December 20, the judge ordered the appearance of the officials to relate how their collection plans were coming along. It is unclear whether Enoch Burke has sufficient resources to meet his financial debt to the State. Despite his imprisonment he has been drawing a full salary from the school and will continue to do so until his expected dismissal is complete.
He must surely have a few bob put away. He still lives at home in Castlebar with the mammy and his room and board has been paid for by the State for most of the last two years, at a cost of around €84,000 per annum, the estimated toll on keeping a person in prison.
He has to have some money that can be surrendered to the State to pay his fines. However, even with the best financial husbandry known to man, he is unlikely to have the full whack required to discharge his debt.
The judge’s reference to the collection of the debt brought a little reality to the whole farrago around Burke and his family. The fines accrue from a court ruling in 2023 that Mr Burke be fined €700 for every day he appears at the school in contravention to a legal ruling.
And on practically every day that the school has been open since, apart from those when he was in prison, he has been there at the gates. The mounting sums have done nothing to deter him. Now judge Nolan wants to know whether there is any reality to Burke’s debt, although strangely enough the judge doubled the fine for any future breaches, which are already occurring.
Judge Nolan also referenced the pointlessness of keeping Enoch in prison. The judge said it was no longer, for the moment, in society’s interests to do so. “It is clear to me that he has been persuaded by others that he is best seen as a martyr,” the judge said.
So what happens now? If, as seems probable, Burke continues to be in contempt, is he to be sent back to prison at huge cost to the State once more? Is there any point?
Right now, the Burkes appear to believe that imprisonment is the primary method by which to signal their self proclaimed virtue.
Three days before Enoch was released in December his father Sean Burke was sentenced to two months in prison for assaulting a garda. The assault occurred in March 2023 when Mr Burke was being escorted from a courtroom because he insisted on disrupting proceedings. He was found to have assaulted Garda Victoria Fisher but he was spared a conviction and the probation act was applied.
He emerged from that trial with a clean record but he still wasn’t happy. He appealed the nominal verdict to the Circuit Court. After a three day hearing, the court found him guilty, sentenced him to two months in prison, to be suspended if he signed a bond of good behaviour. He wasn’t happy with that. He opted to go to prison, hugging one of his sons as he left the court, as if he was Mandela en route to Robben island for the remainder of his natural life.
What ails the Burkes is not a big principle about a belief in God nor opposition to people changing gender nor some celestial concept known only to those who grew up in their home. What ails them is actually a belief that they are above the law, removed from it, as if their God has given them a special dispensation.
One might surmise that Sean Burke believes the assault on a female garda to have occurred while he was “on mission” from some deity attempting to save the world from evil of one sort or another. Or, far more likely, he just wanted to present as a martyr prepared to go to prison for his beliefs, even when those beliefs confer on him the right to assault a female garda.
On Christmas Eve, three days after Enoch was released from prison, he and his mother Martina recorded themselves outside Mountjoy lamenting that it was “a great shock” to them that Sean was locked up inside. Why the shock? He asked to be locked up and refused the opportunity to remain free. On the recording Enoch proceeded to rerun his father’s trial, casting it as a miscarriage of justice and concluding that this was “a bad day for the country.”
The Burkes see themselves as tribunes of righteousness and common sense in a world gone mad. That’s their prerogative, and there are plenty of others who might agree with them. But the difference with the Burkes is that their cast iron self-confidence and high educational attainment prompts them to act as if they simply know they are right and are only too eager to further their aims through the perceived martyrdom of being locked up.
Of course they must be subject to the same sanctions as everybody else if they break the law, including imprisonment. Of course the State should go after Enoch Burke for its money, just as the State goes after many others who accumulate debts in ways far less obnoxious. But is there really any point to locking him up again for his contempt? Surely, at this point in the whole farrago, there is nothing more to be gained by granting him that obviously fevered wish.
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