Enoch Burke says Mountjoy prisoners agreed he "should not be there"
Enoch Burke has told the High Court that his fellow inmates in Mountjoy Prison had offered him support when he was imprisoned after breaching an injunction following a row with the school where he was teaching over transgender issues. He said they told him to “keep the head up” and that “you should not be in here”.
Mr Burke said that when he was first brought to the prison, other inmates told him they agreed with him and that biscuits and popcorn had been left at his cell door.
Since his arrival, he said, the kindness, generosity and goodwill of prisoners never stopped, with his fellow prisoners giving him free haircuts. “I have never had a bad word said to me in Mountjoy and to this day have never had a hand laid on me. I have been treated with goodwill and respect because I have empathy for them,” he told the court.
Mr Burke is taking a defamation action against Mediahuis Ireland, the publishers of the Sunday Independent, which he says published an article defaming him in October 2022, whereby it was claimed he was annoying prisoners and had to be moved because he was in danger of being beaten.
He says the claim is untrue and that the article was published ‘maliciously and with recklessness’, and that the story, which he says, was “circulated to millions” then “triggered a storm of damaging posts” about him that still continues.
He pointed to one comment which said “imagine being locked up with Enoch Burke, you’d beg the warden for solitary confinement”.
The publisher denies defamation and will plead fair and reasonable publication on a matter of public interest.
Mr Burke is still being detained in Mountjoy Prison because he refuses to comply with court orders not to attend Wilson’s Hospital School in Co Westmeath after the school dismissed him over a row around transgenderism.
The teacher told the High Court in his opening statement in his defamation action that the “sting of the libel is that my normal pattern of life is to vex unbearably the people I live and work with on a daily basis by the relentless expression of my personal and religious views and that I am unfit to be a teacher”.
He described the article as “scurrilous” – and said that it portrayed him as a pariah in the community. He also said that another Sunday Independent article which said he had been placed on an enhanced wing as “complete bunkum, totally untrue and complete fiction”.
The case continues to be heard.
