Three members of a well-known Irish evangelical Christian family were forcibly ejected from a St Patrick’s Day gala dinner in Washington, which Ireland’s Taoiseach, or Prime Minister, Micheál Martin had attended as keynote speaker.
Isaac and Ammi Burke, along with their mother Martina, interrupted the high-profile annual Ireland Funds dinner to protest at the continued imprisonment of Enoch Burke.
Enoch Burke, a teacher, was arrested for a third time by Irish police at Wilson’s Hospital School in County Westmeath in late September after refusing to abide by a court order instructing him to stay away.
Washington police forcibly removed the three after they disrupted a prize acceptance speech by Dan Quinn, head coach of the Washington Commanders NFL team.
“We live in fear in Ireland,” said Martina Burke afterwards. “My son has spent over 500 days in Mountjoy Prison simply because he will not affirm a 15-year-old boy in transgender ideology and use the ‘they’ pronoun.”
“Every single child is taught LGBTQ+ bisexual transgender as fact. It’s a sad day for Ireland. We need [US] President [Donald] Trump to know the truth. But Micheál Martin is deceiving him,” she continued.
Enoch, a second-level teacher from Castlebar in County Mayo, was first suspended from his position at Wilson’s Hospital School in June 2022 after publicly challenging a request from his principal to refer to a transgender student as “they”.
Despite his suspension – Burke’s contract was eventually terminated in January 2023 – he has continued to attempt to return to the Church of Ireland boarding school in Westmeath. He has remained on full pay at the school, pending the hearing of his appeal against his dismissal.
He has been intermittently jailed in Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison for a total of about 500 days for contempt of court, after disregarding an August 30 2022 court order the school obtained directing him to stay away.
Burke told a High Court judge in September 2022 that he believed it was against the Bible to change one’s sex and that he would “only obey God” and “not obey man”.
Judge David Nolan ordered his release on December 20, 2024, following a period of imprisonment from September 2 and suggested his salary from the school could be used to pay the €193,000 Burke currently owed for breaching court orders
He is one of ten children in the family of evangelical Protestants, all of whom were home-schooled. Burke’s parents, Sean and Martina, run an independent evangelical church and school near Castlebar.
Along with Micheál Martin, the black-tie dinner was attended by several members of the US Congress, as well as the UK’s Northern Ireland Secretary Hilary Benn and the British Ambassador Peter Mandelson.
Martin has spent the week of St Patrick’s Day in Washington, as is customary for Irish heads of government, and presented Trump with a traditional bowl of shamrock during a meeting in the Oval Office.
Martin declared Ireland was “ready to work” with the US to bring about peace in Ukraine and the Middle East.
Perhaps learning from Trump’s stormy meeting with Ukraine’s President Vladimir Zelensky two weeks before, Martin largely deflected or ignored critical comments from the US President at the meeting also attended by US Vice President JD Vance.
These included that “Ireland has entire US pharmaceutical industry in its grasp”, and that along with the rest of the European Union, Ireland was “taking advantage of the US”.
