+34
What’s fascinating about the video he posted last week is the total clash of discourses it represents
Enoch Burke leaving Wilson's Hospital School on Co Westmeath on the first day of the new school year. Photograph: Garrett White/Collins Photos’s long-running campaign of public self-martyrdom, in which I claimed to see it as a work of conceptual art.
The whole thing – the endless court appearances; the repeated jailings and forcible removals; the performance of stoic resilience in the face of supposed state repression; the cod-legalistic repudiations of judge’s rulings – struck me as a masterpiece of pure self-generating spectacle. It seemed amusing and absurd to consider Burke as a product of exactly the sort of media-saturated modernity to which he would fancy himself diametrically opposed.
Although my intent was largely ironic, there was at least some small part of me that sincerely believed it. A week ago, Burke was back in the news – not a particularly remarkable turn of events, admittedly, given how little he seems to have been out of the news since he was first suspended from his teaching position well over four years ago now.
Burke was once again, Wilson’s Hospital in Westmeath, marking the beginning of a new school year by reprising his performance as “Sacked Teacher Enoch Burke” . In a video he himself recorded and posted to social media, he could be seen trying to enter through the gates of the school, and being prevented from doing so by a remarkably calm security guard in a bright orange jacket.
Burke, as is his custom, berates the guard relentlessly. He is blocked from his place of work after he refused to call a young child “they” and affirm transgenderism, an anti-Christian ideology upheld by church, state, and government. …What’s fascinating about the video is the total clash of discourses it represents.
The premise of Burke’s performance is that he is trying to get to work, to do his job, to teach his students and is being prevented from doing so by the security guard, a bemused but largely implacable man who looks to be in his mid 60s. This guard, according to Burke, is acting in service of Big Transgenderism, the ideology that has supposedly captured every institution of Irish society – media, government, legal system, regional private security firms and so on.
Moving from Dublin to Kerry: ‘We really noticed the lack of any noise, apart from the animals’At the end of the summer, just like the rest of you, I’m sick of the sight of my children “No, no,” says Burke, “you’re obstructing me from attending my workplace, because I wouldn’t call a young boy ‘they’.
” As always, what is striking about Burke here is his uniquely potent combination of hauteur and delusion. His manner is polished, supercilious, legalistic; he appears, as he speaks, to be making the so-called “Clinton thumb”, a closed fist with the thumb lying flat on top of it, a gesture of resolute emphasis and candour. And yet everything he is saying in this moment is entirely false.
Wilson’s Hospital is, famously, very muchhis workplace: he was suspended from his job there in 2022, and after a series of court orders barring him from entering the premises – not to mention multiple custodial sentences for ignoring those orders – was officially dismissed there earlier this year. And none of this, of course, was a result of his refusal to address a young transgender student by their chosen pronoun; it was for his derailing of a school meeting to fulminate on this personal obsession, and for haranguing the principal over the school’s decision to acknowledge the student’s choice of pronouns.
These mere matters of fact, however, are crushed beneath the sheer weight and density of the former schoolteacher’s obsessively self-created reality. He is enacting this spectacle as part of a broad conservative culture war against a supposed “woke” ideology that permits, and even encourages, young people to adopt whatever gender or sexual identities they see fit. Part of this is just plain old-fashioned homophobia.
“You have forced LGBT ideology down their necks,” he tells the security guard. “You will give an account to God, and you won’t be laughing then. ” The “morals of Sodom and Gomorrah”, he says, “are being forced on students”. But Burke is also, more generally, staging a reaction against postmodernism, that bete noire of the online right.
Boys are boys and girls are girls, and any attempt to portray gender or sexuality as more complex and ambiguous is part of an unholy campaign to undermine truth itself. And this gets to the heart of what is most strange and unsettling, and most pungently ironic, about Burke and his case. Because he is himself a deeply postmodern figure, a pure avatar of our internet-addled age, embodying a fracturing consensus about what is real and what is true.
When he tells the guard he’s impinging on his rights, he’s referring to an enclosed and idiosyncratic understanding of rights and of the law, which seems not to overlap with the actual law, or how it has been enforced in his case. When the security guard asks him whether he’s saying the law is wrong, he says: “The law is not being upheld; and you are disobeying and breaking the law by standing in front of me and obstructing me.
” In his seeming belief in a true and rightful law that precedes and outranks a usurping legal system of the State, Burke is strangely reminiscent of the Freeman on the Land movement. That political pathology emerged in recent decades around a sort of jurisprudence conspiracy theory: the idea that statute law only applies to those who “consent” to it, and that individuals can opt out of legal obligations such as taxes, court jurisdiction and criminal prosecution by declaring themselves outside the state’s authority.
What is fascinating about this movement, and about Burke’s refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of the legal rulings against him, is that both come strangely close to acknowledging something real and rarely enough noted: the socially constructed nature of normative vocabularies such as the law, its status as a kind of vast and complex fiction whose power, like that of money, is drawn from our collective belief in it. But Burke goes farther than this, of course.
For all his performance as the archetypal conservative standing athwart history, as William Buckley put it, yelling stop – he really is a kind of unwitting postmodernist. He has constructed his own reality, insisting with grim theatrical conviction that everyone else inhabit it too.
‘Community care’ is exposed as an empty concept when a carer diesI don’t regret running for president. I do regret the sectarian undercurrent it exposedJudge dismisses five TV licence summonses after evidence of television in homes not providedPatrick Bergin, co-star of Julia Roberts in Sleeping with the Enemy, seeks buyer for Offaly castleIreland’s ETF investors face another wait for deemed-disposal reformWhy aren’t the Irish more enthusiastic about eating fish?
Ireland Latest News, Ireland Headlines
Similar News: You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Phoenix Park to Close to General Public for Two Days Following Garda RequestThe Office of Public Works has announced that Phoenix Park will be closed to the general public from 11pm on Thursday September 10th until 6pm on Saturday September 12th following a request from An Garda Síochána. All gates and roads through the park will be shut, meaning attractions including Dublin Zoo will be inaccessible to visitors on Friday and Saturday. Access will remain available only to essential staff.
Read more »
Mark Moriarty’s midweek recipe for chicken satay skewersThis dish begins slowly with a fridge marinade, but things move fast after that
Read more »
New York remembers 9/11: A bar in the shadow of the towers and the lives lost that dayAs New York prepares to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the story of O'Hara's Irish pub on Cedar Street stands as a living testament to the neighbourhood that existed in the shadow of the World Trade Center. Co-owner Mike Keane recalls the moment the first plane struck, while the family of Patrick Currivan, an Irish businessman aboard American Airlines Flight 11, shares the haunting premonitions his sister experienced that morning in Dublin. Their story intersects with that of the Naudet brothers, filmmakers who happened to be embedded with a fire crew near the towers.
Read more »
Sydney Swans power past Brisbane Lions as Conor McKenna and Mark Keane star in AFL finals openersThe Sydney Swans overcame off-field turmoil and an early injury to captain Callum Mills to defeat Conor McKenna's Brisbane Lions by 53 points in the AFL finals opener. Mark Keane's Adelaide also celebrated their first finals win in nine years by beating the Western Bulldogs.
Read more »