Mark O'Connell: For all his delusion, Enoch Burke comes strangely close to acknowledging something real

Last year, I wrote a column in these pages about the former teacher Enoch Burke’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 outside the gates of his former school, Wilson’s Hospital in Westmeath, marking the beginning of a new school year by reprising his performance as “Sacked Teacher Enoch Burke” (sometimes referred to as “Jailed 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. BREAKING: A security guard has barred teacher Enoch Burke from entering school this morningHe 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.… pic.twitter.com/TZPCz6lvzp— Enoch Burke (@EnochBurke) August 28, 2026 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. (Needless to say, this man is simply doing his job, which he was presumably hired for by the school, and doing it with an admirable combination of firmness and good humour.)READ MORE“You’re trespassing,” says the security guard.“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 much not his 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.[ Is postmodernism to blame for our society losing its way?Opens in new window ]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.