Teacher Enoch Burke will remain in prison after refusing to obey a court order banning him from trespassing at Wilson’s Hospital School.<\/p>\n
Mr Burke appeared before the High Court via video link and was given the opportunity to purge his contempt of court, which would allow him to leave prison.<\/p>\n
He has been engaged in a legal dispute with the Co Westmeath school since 2022.<\/p>\n
He was suspended following incidents arising from a request from the school’s then-principal to address a student by a new name and pronoun, and later dismissed from his position.<\/p>\n
Mr Burke has repeatedly argued the direction was unconstitutional and went against his right to express his religious beliefs.<\/p>\n
He has spent more than 650 days in prison after he was found to have violated court orders instructing him not to trespass at the school.<\/p>\n
Mr Burke appeared in court via video link four years to the month since the dispute first began.<\/p>\n
He said: “I shouldn’t be in prison, I should be in my classroom, I should be with my students, I shouldn’t be here.”<\/p>\n
Asked by Mr Justice Brian Cregan whether he would return to the school if released from prison, Mr Burke replied: “I have faithfully attended at my workplace for eight years, that is not trespassing.”<\/p>\n
Mr Cregan told him: “You know perfectly well that you are in breach of a High Court order.<\/p>\n
“It is clear, Mr Burke, you don’t want to purge your contempt.”<\/p>\n
He said Mr Burke could be released from prison at any stage if he committed to staying away from the school.<\/p>\n
“The school doesn’t want you in prison, the court doesn’t want you in prison,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Teacher Enoch Burke will remain in prison after refusing to obey a court order banning him from trespassing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":433586,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-433585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=433585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433585\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/433586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=433585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=433585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=433585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}