Irish teacher Enoch Burke was arrested and jailed in November 2025. He was charged with contempt of court, and authorities insist this has nothing to do with his refusal to use a transgender student’s preferred pronouns.
Technically, they are correct that his imprisonment stems from repeated violations of a court order barring him from returning to the school during his suspension.
However, it is also true that the entire case began with his refusal to give in to transgender ideology, which led to his suspension in the first place. Burke was a teacher at Wilson’s Hospital School in County Westmeath, Ireland.
In 2022 the school instructed staff to refer to a transgender student by a new name and the “they/them” pronoun, and Burke refused to comply.
After he publicly objected at a school event and confronted school leadership, he was suspended pending disciplinary proceedings.
The school then obtained a court injunction barring him from its premises for the duration of his suspension.
Despite that order, Burke repeatedly returned to the school, prompting officials to seek court enforcement. He has since been found in contempt of court multiple times.
In late November 2025, a High Court judge ordered his committal to prison again, describing his repeated attendance as trespass and noting that fines were no longer effective.
Along with jail time, Burke is now facing fines exceeding 225,000 euros.
Historically, Ireland was one of the strongest Catholic countries in the world.
For most of the twentieth century more than 90 percent of the population identified as Catholic, and weekly Mass attendance often exceeded 90 percent.
Religious vocations were high, with thousands of priests and more than a thousand seminarians in the mid-1960s.
Hellbound and Down 