ENOCH BURKE has lost a defamation case he brought against the publishers of the Sunday Independent, Mediahaus Ireland.
The teacher, who has been in Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison since September 2023 for contempt of court and was previously jailed for the same offence in September 2022, had taken the action over an article published in October 2022.
The report claimed Burke had been moved within the prison due to being in danger from other prisoners whom he had repeatedly expressed his religious beliefs too.
In a judgement issued today, Mr Justice Rory Mulcahy found that while the content of the article was inaccurate, the words used in it “were not capable of being defamatory”.
“I have concluded that the words used in the Article, in their ordinary and natural meaning, were incapable of injuring the plaintiff’s reputation,” he said.
“Even if they had been capable of injuring his reputation, having regard to the plaintiff’s actual reputation at the time that the Article was published, the Article did not and could not have injured his reputation,” he added.
Burke was imprisoned for breaching a court order banning him from attending the school where he worked in Westmeath.
He was suspended by Wilson's Hospital School in August 2022 after refusing to address a transgender student by their new name and with the "they" pronoun.
After being suspended from the school, he continued to turn up for work.
A court injunction was put in place barring him from the school premises, which he continually ignored.
After breaching the court order Burke was jailed in September 2022.
He was released three months later, but was jailed again last year for continuing to breach the order.
Making his judgement today, Judge Mulcahy said: “It must be the case that any person’s reputation is diminished in the eyes of a reasonable member of society if they simply refuse to comply with a Court order.
“In a democratic state, operating in accordance with the rule of law, it is simply not open to anyone to decide with which orders of the court they will comply.
“If a person is the subject of a court order and considers that it was wrongly made, on any ground, then the remedy is to appeal that order, not to simply ignore it,” he added.
“For clarity, I do not suggest that, because Mr Burke had been found to be in contempt of court and committed to prison, nothing could be said about him that is defamatory.
“The case law is clear, even a blemished reputation can be injured, however, where the allegedly defamatory statement is not inconsistent with the person’s actual reputation, indeed, is very much less serious than the matters which give rise to the plaintiff’s actual reputation, then in my view, no injury to reputation has occurred.”
In conclusion, Judge Mulcahy said “the words used in the Article, in their ordinary and natural meaning, were incapable of injuring the plaintiff’s reputation”.
"I will make an order dismissing the plaintiff’s claim," he added.
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