When Judge Brian Cregan made an order last week to send Martina and Ammi Burke to jail, he did so with the exasperated words: “It is long past time for the court to call a halt to this family circus.”
You don’t have to be a fan of the mobster movie genre to understand that taking the head of the family out of circulation is usually thought of as the best way to achieve this. I am not suggesting, of course, Martina Burke is a Toto Riina or even a Tony Soprano. She is an evangelical Christian, a teacher and a God-fearing mother of 10 preternaturally gifted adult offspring. She had never, until this week, been accused of anything more serious than making a nuisance of herself. In fairness, she does a lot of that.
But having sat through five months of Enoch Burke-related hearings, Cregan had enough. “Mrs [Martina] Burke and Ms [Ammi] Burke – just like their brother Enoch – are not exceptional. They are just exceptionally unable to accept what every other citizen in this Republic accepts every day ... We live in a democracy governed by the rule of law and not a theocracy governed by the Burke family.”
You can understand his frustration over their stubborn intransigence, their shoutiness, the endless court hours dedicated to dealing with them – mostly not very effectively. To their credit, the Burkes are not oblivious to this either. “So that’s one, two, three, four, five, seven, six, seven, 10 gardaí arrived at court today to arrest Ammi Burke and Martina Burke,” says a female voice in a video Josiah Burke posted last week. “Think of all the crime and the abuse, the drug dealing happening in Dublin.”
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But dispatching Martina and Ammi off to the Dóchas Centre for two weeks is unlikely to put an end to the Burke family circus. If anything, the circus may be about to go full cirque du soleil.
The thing about the Burkes not always appreciated is this: they may style themselves as moral crusaders in the row over transgender rights, but their grievances have not always involved matters of faith or morality. The popular understanding of them as “Christian evangelicals” doesn’t capture the full scope of their corpus juris. A trawl through the public skirmishes involving one or other Burke reveals a sweeping list of grievances against a range of individuals and bodies including:
- University of Galway: four of the Burke siblings (Isaac, Ammi, Enoch and Kezia) took a case to the Workplace Relations Commission and then in 2021 to the Circuit Court against the university over a 2014 decision to bar them for life from membership of college societies, which they claimed was religious discrimination. They lost.
- University of Galway (again): Isaac was successful in a 2020 case against the institution over a delay scheduling his final viva exams for his PhD, winning €13,035 damages.
- Former chief medical officer Tony Holohan: Jemima publicly challenged the CMO at a press conference in May 2020, in an encounter which went viral.
- Mayo Coroner Patrick O’Connor: a 2020 inquest into the death of student Sally Maaz had to be abandoned after interruptions by Josiah. Jemima later had a run-in with the coroner following another inquest which saw her convicted of a public order offence. She had the conviction quashed.
- Former minister for education Norma Foley: Elijah won a Supreme Court case in 2022 in which it was found that excluding homeschooled Leaving Cert students from calculated grades during the pandemic was a breach of their rights.
- Law firm Arthur Cox: Ammi took an unfair dismissal case against the firm in 2022, which ended up going to the Court of Appeal before it was thrown out. Martina came to national attention when she railed against Ammi’s workload.
- And, of course, Wilson’s Hospital School, plus several members of its disciplinary appeals panel and a number of judges, whom Enoch has variously, without evidence, accused of bias or lying.
It seems fair to say that whatever is driving them, it is not exclusively religious zealotry. How, then, did a family with such sharp minds and understanding of the legal system end up in pursuit of such an exhausting and costly war against it? In a fascinating piece for The Irish Times this week, Áine Ryan uncovered another side of the Burkes: as a polite, quiet bunch who sometimes offer free grinds to students who can’t afford them. So why do the cases involving them – many of which have been found to have some merit – descend into chaos and farce?
[ Enoch Burke’s father Sean jailed for courtroom assault on gardaOpens in new window ]
The answer may have less to do with any divine mission and more to do with an over-developed sense of personal grievance, plus a conviction that the modern world in general – and the legal system in particular – is out to get them.
And yet, there’s an argument that every healthy democracy should have a few of its own Burkes. They are the legal system’s version of antivirus software: if there’s a gap to be exploited, a vulnerability or an obscure procedure that has not been correctly followed, they will root it out.
They have single-handedly, for example, reignited a long-standing debate over the need for reform of civil contempt. They routinely test the patience of the courts, but they also prove the resilience of the principle that every individual – no matter how eccentric or rude – is free to go to court to have their rights vindicated.
Judge Brian Cregan can silence them, as he did this week when he repeatedly muted Enoch’s mic in court, but there may be no shutting the Burkes up. Trying though they are, that’s not altogether a bad thing.
