The Unjudicial Pillorying of Enoch Burke

An expanded Extract from Diary of a Dissenter, by John Waters, w/e November 21st, 2025

When Justice Snores

The most recent ruling in the Enoch Burke case of a High Court judge, name of Brian Cregan, is one of the most offensive, egregious, graceless, disingenuous and unreasonable things I have observed in a long history of reading and analysing the emanations of various courts. The ‘bottom line’ of the ruling is that Enoch should be arrested and brought back to prison, where he has already spent more than five hundred days for the ‘crime’ of refusing to concede that two plus two equals five. The pretext for this outrage is the assertion, being made for the thousandth time, that Enoch is in contempt of court by virtue of continuing to turn up for work at the place of employment, Wilson’s Hospital School in Multyfarnham, County Westmeath, from which he has been dismissed on foot of a spurious and dishonest charge made against him by a now former principal at the school.

Had Enoch Burke been harbouring contempt for the courts which had sent him to jail on the utterly dishonest basis that he had done something wrong, then that contempt would be entirely justified, for what is contemptible deserves only contempt.The school has dishonestly claimed, and several judges of the High Court have dishonestly repeated, that Enoch Burke was never directed by the principal in question to address a male student claiming to be transitioning to womanhood as ‘they’. Enoch Burke has consistently insisted that he was, asserting that this was a gross infringement of his religious beliefs, and therefore his constitutional rights, since he subscribes to the Biblical notion that there are, in fact, just two sexes and it is not possible to journey between them. In the event that things happened as Enoch claims (and they clearly did, as the Court of Appeal has recently conceded) he would be fully entitled to the protection of the Irish Constitution, which provides inter alia for the right to religious belief (Article 44), and as Article 40.6.1i attests that ‘[t]he right of the citizens to express freely their convictions and opinions’ shall be guaranteed.

One more time, you may, if you wish, read the Independent’s report on Cregan J’s. extraordinary rant against Enoch Burke by clicking here.

While having no desire to wade through raw sewage, I shall reproduce below some of the more malodorous nuggets, against the eventuality that these diaries may yet be published in book form, in which case it would be vital for the reader to understand the level of degeneracy which now afflicts the Irish judicial system.

The judge described Enoch Burke’s behaviour as ‘grotesque’ and a ‘fanatical campaign against transgenderism.’ I say the judge’s ruling is grotesque.

He said inter alia:

‘He [Enoch] is a baleful and malign presence — an intruder, stalking the school, its teachers and its pupils’.

He described Enoch’s behaviour in court as ‘a deliberate strategy of confrontation, verbal aggression and bullying.’

He said the Burke family had no right to engage in the verbal abuse of a judge and that it was clear their actions were ‘concerted, organised and systematic’, occurring in ‘hearing after hearing.’

‘His verbal aggression towards this court, was, in my experience, unprecedented.’

He said it was ‘astonishing’ that whenever Mr Burke was before the courts, gardaí had to be present to ‘protect members of the judiciary and/or registrars against outbursts’ and to ensure hearings can proceed.

He further said that Enoch Burke was ‘an utterly intransigent litigant who is so blinkered in his approach to all issues that he believes that only he is right and that everybody else is wrong.’

He said that far too much attention had been focussed on Mr Burke and not enough on the children and teachers in the school, adding that Enoch’s ‘trespassing’ undermined the work of teachers ‘to nurture, protect and educate pupils.’

Without apparent elaboration, he asserted:

‘There is something deeply unsettling about Mr Burke’s presence at the school. He doesn’t just trespass on to the school grounds; he goes right into the heart of the school, roaming around its corridors when he has no right to do so.’

He said that Enoch Burke would rather the school spent €1,000 per week on security rather than on the needs of pupils.

He continued:

‘This then is the grotesque behaviour of a teacher who puts his own ridiculous sense of himself above the needs of his pupils. It is clear that Mr Burke is willing to sacrifice the pupils of the school on the altar of his fanatical campaign against transgenderism’.

Enoch at work

Stop right here. Consider that phrase ‘above the needs of his pupils’ — a Freudian slip, no doubt, which nonetheless gives away the true sentiment underlying the bombast and brutality of his remarks. In this phrase, which acknowledges that Enoch Burke remains the teacher of these pupils, he concedes the legitimacy of Enoch’s purpose in continuing to attend at his school.

But, ignoring his own implicit logic, the judge went on to say that Enoch Burke and other members of his family ‘appear to suggest that somehow they have a greater moral right or greater moral authority than the courts to assert their rights, or that they have a God-given right to do what they do’.

‘This is simply not true, either as a matter of law, or as a matter of political and constitutional theory. This court will not take any lessons in religion from Mr Burke or any of the Burke family.’

Perhaps not, But perhaps the courts might need to take lessons in constitutional theory from someone or other, since they appear to have abandoned all pretence of being guardians of the Irish Constitution.

The judge continues his harangue:

‘Neither Mr Burke nor any other members of his family have any monopoly on Christian values or on the Bible. Perhaps Mr Burke should spend more time reflecting on Jesus’s words in the Sermon on the Mount: ‘Do onto others as you would have them do onto you’.

Ditto the judiciary. Ditto the political establishment, Ditto the purchased media, who provide covering fire for these grotesque abuses.

Referring to a hearing where Mr Burke told the judge to ‘wipe that smirk off your face’, Mr Justice Cregan said the use of such an expression towards a judge of the High Court was ‘not normal behaviour.’

This is true, and more’s the pity, for a little more of that, and a little less deference from cowed citizens might result in a return to the rule of law in our once decent and well-regulated country.

The judge continued:

‘It shows that Mr Burke has an unbridled tongue and clearly has difficulty in regulating his anger. He could say anything, at any time, to a teacher or pupil and spark an incident.’

‘This level of verbal aggression, unregulated anger and lack of self-control, combined with his deliberate strategy of confrontation, make him a potential danger to pupils and teachers of the school.’

I’ll pause here in my process of citation and commentary to state some fundamental observations. Firstly, either the judge is ideologically committed to the concept of transgenderism or he does not know or understand what it entails. You would think he was speaking here of someone who had been convicted of rape, rather than a man who has suffered enormously on account of being to the fore in calling out one of the most egregious cultural perversions in the whole of human history, i.e. the pushing upon the vulnerable young the belief that they can ameliorate any sense of unease or inadequacy they may feel by having their own bodies butchered.

Transgenderism is neither a fashion nor a fad; it is a death cult. Either the judge is utterly ignorant of this or he regards transgenderism as something quite different, like ‘equality’ or ‘progressivism’, which is how it is peddled in much of the purchased setaside media. If so, he needs to engage in some research, whereby to smarten his ideas up.

The judge makes no reference to the recent acknowledgement of a Court of Appeal judge, Ms Justice Mary Faherty, who said plainly that she ‘did not agree with the High Court’s finding that the concerns which led to Mr Burke’s suspension and subsequent dismissal related solely to the public way in which he expressed his opinion.’

She added there was ‘merit’ in Enoch Burke’s submission that the principal had ‘also’ been concerned about the substance of his objections to calling the student a new name and using they/them pronouns. This is a tendentious way of stating that she accepted that Enoch’s primary issue was that he was instructed to address a student in a fashion he regarded as incorrect and damaging to that pupil and others, as well as being contrary to his own beliefs, religious in particular. This is the nub of the matter — that multiple, High Court judges have conspired to conceal from the public this fundamental aspect of what is happening, and to bully Enoch Burke into agreeing to their twisting of the facts of his case.

Judge Faherty, who was at pains to state that she was finding in favour of Enoch Burke ‘with a great deal of reluctance’, then somewhat counter-intuitively went on to deny Enoch his costs — stating that, in the normal course, he should be granted the costs of the appeal, but adding that they were ‘not in normal territory’ due to ‘Mr Burke’s contempt of court’ — an aspect of her ruling that rather alarmingly jells with the overt attempt of the Irish establishment to dispossess Enoch Burke of his income and assets as a means of silencing him. I wish them no luck with that, nor will they have any.

Faherty J. said that there remained the question as to whether Enoch Burke, ‘with his history of contempt of court gets to pick and choose how and when he gets to invoke the court’s protection and jurisdiction’. She also reportedly said that granting him the injunction he sought should not be seen as the Court of Appeal condoning his ‘egregious contempt’.

That a judge can say such a thing in open court ought to chill this society to its core. The ‘protection and jurisdiction’ of the court is not self-generated, but conferred by the Irish people. The most basic principles of justice do not permit someone to be excluded from the safeguards and protections of the justice system simply because he has given offence to judges, least of all those who have thoroughly earned his contempt, if such it can even be termed in this case. Although in making such statements, judges are able to call-in vast oceans of manufactured prejudice deposited in the population by corrupt media, this does nothing to undermine the objective facts: that Enoch Burke, in everything he has done, has been vigorously and legitimately protesting the prior abuses he suffered at the hands of our corrupt court system, which has in this case utterly ignored principles of the Irish Constitution which protect freedom of conscience and the free profession and practice of religion, and require the State not to impose ‘any disabilities or make any discrimination on the ground of religious profession, belief or status.’

And yet, I believe it is necessary to read between the lines of the Faherty ruling, bearing in mind the ideological pressure being exerted on all relevant parties to this imbroglio in an effort to bring the transgender death cult over the line.

My impression, on learning of that ruling, was that the ‘great deal of reluctance’ business was a figleaf to cover the embarrassment of the courts as they rush to mend their hands after three years of abuse and corruption by several of their colleague judges. Much of the Irish judicial system — as with our public institutions in general — may be out of control, but there must surely be — I thought aloud — a few conscientious individual judges who baulk at the lead given to them by several of these colleague judges, through whose grubby paws this case has passed before now. The Faherty ruling, for all its unfair statements about Enoch, seemed to be telling us that some judges may be seeking an opportune off-ramp on the Burke case.

In view of this, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Cregan J. may here be seeking to prevent such a turnaround, and instead finish the job off by returning Enoch to jail and trusting that the public will have become sufficiently confused by the different characterisations of the facts of this case that most people will simply look away.

That’s not going to happen, for a number of reasons. One is that transgenderism is without doubt one of the greatest evils of the modern world, an attempted distortion of the nature of the human that spreads its evil and mendacious message by means of contagion, and the support of people who ought to know better but clearly do not, or alternatively care not. In due course — and it may take decades — these obscenities will come to light, and when they do, those who have supported this appalling movement and its spurious ideology will be exposed as among the most egregious criminals of the twenty-first century. When that happens, the Enoch Burke case will become the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four cases rolled into one, and multiplied by a thousand. Those who have colluded in smearing and tormenting this good man and his decent family will experience the appalling vista of going down in infamy as the Lord Dennings of their time, if not actually the Trevelyans, Cromwells or Blackadders — although the latter referenced individual had at least the grace to state of the man he was sentencing to death, one P.H. Pearse, that he was the finest man he had ever met. Enoch Burke is a man worthy of equal respect, but all he gets from our rancid establishment is abuse, insults and — let us politely say — disinformation.

When the truth finally emerges, crowds may well arrive at the home of Mr Justice Cregan, [in the manner of the three moronic Guardstapo officers who arrived at the Burke household last Wednesday, followed by four more galoots ‘just following orders’ later on the same day, on foot of the judge’s ruling] and read aloud this appalling judgement and its outrageous calumnies against perhaps the most heroic Irish figure of the twenty-first century so far.

But there is worse in this ruling than even what I have already outlined.

Enoch Burke, the judge said, had without justification accused him and a barrister of lying, and had done so ‘to deflect and distract from his own lies’. I am unaware of the precise context of Enoch’s accusation here, though I suspect it may be inferred from what I have outlined above. The suggestion that Enoch has lied, and in particular that he has lied about the substantive issues of this case, is entirely false. Enoch has been truthful, while many other involved individuals have not.

The judge went on as though to parody a self-inferred version of Enoch Burke’s strategy, declaiming:

‘Confront the principal; confront the bishop; confront the school; confront the security guards; confront the courts. His verbal aggression in the school was one of the reasons for his dismissal for gross misconduct’.

It would be more correct to say that an allegation of verbal aggression against Enoch had been a pretext of the trumped-up charges against him, the foundational attempt to distract from the real issue, which was the imposition upon Enoch of a mandate concerning the mode in which he was required to address a pupil, something that is wholly unconscionable from both the constitutional and human perspectives. As for his strategy, well that was simply an attempt over several years to call representatives of various self-styled ‘moral’ institutions to do the decent thing and speak out about the most outlandish orchestration of human destruction imposed by an Irish government in more than a hundred years.

Moreover, Judge Cregan must know that, as Faherty J. has acknowledged, several High Court judges have, from the outset, claimed that Enoch Burke’s demeanour and responses were the sole reasons for his dismissal, so that Cregan J.’s allusion to ‘one of the reasons’ looks like an attempt to muddy the waters and assist his High Court colleagues in belatedly mending their hands — for, on the basis of this throwaway allusion, it might well be gathered that they had all along acknowledged the core facts of the case. Such an impression would be erroneous.

The judge also claimed that Enoch had repeatedly claimed he was jailed and fined because of his opposition to ‘transgenderism’, insisting that this ‘simply was not true.’

Oh, but it was and remains true. Transgenderism and the government’s desperate attempt to promote it in accordance with instructions from its overlords, is the whole of what this is about. Enoch’s ‘contempt’, and his constant attempts to assert his innocence by continuing to turn up for work, are downstream consequences of the distortions and lies perpetrated by several judges, and now compounded by the ruling of Mr Justice Cregan.

The judge continued digging:

‘It needs to be restated clearly by this court — as has been stated clearly by previous courts — that Mr Burke has not been imprisoned or fined for his views on transgender issues, which he is perfectly entitled to have and to articulate.’

Ah, but no: it has already been established in the Faherty ruling that Enoch was ordered by his superior to address a boy as ‘they’. Enich declined. What has gotten Enoch Burke into even deeper trouble is that he insists on stating things the Government of Ireland wishes him not to say, an egregiously disreputable position which some members of the judiciary have felt moved to rush in to support.

The old ‘contempt of court’ line was trotted out:

‘Mr Burke has been imprisoned, and fined, for contempt of court, because he has breached court orders directing him not to trespass on school property,’ the judge said. Technically, yes; but why? Because Enoch Burke is a ‘turbulent priest’ who will not succumb to the Trappist disposition or agree to being defrocked without cause.

Mr Justice Cregan further said Enoch Burke has engaged in ‘a deliberately mendacious campaign full of misinformation and disinformation.’ He has not, but several judges, as well as members of the senior staff members of Wilson’s Hospital School, multiple politicians and virtually every journaliar in Ireland, have done their best to mislead the public about what is happening here.

The judge referred to a video posted on Mr Burke’s X account of a stand-off between him and a security guard on the school grounds last month. In the video, Mr Burke said: ‘I have a right to be here. I’m not trespassing. I am entitled to be here.’

But the judge said: ‘It is clear that these words of Mr Burke are a blatant lie. He has no right to be on the school property. No right at all. He has no more right to be on the school grounds than he has to rob money from a bank. But Mr Burke clearly felt no compunction in lying to the security man to try to gain access to the school.’ Yet, the judge has earlier acknowledged that some of the children at Wilson’s Hospital School are — i.e. remain — Enoch Burke’s pupils.

The reference to robbing money from a bank appears to be another Freudian giveaway, considering that it is the Government that, with the connivance of the judiciary, has stolen money from Enoch Burke’s bank account. Enoch Burke is an honest man who must deal with criminals who accuse him of criminality, using the lies of one another as their ‘evidence’ that Enoch is the liar.

By Cregan J.’s ruling, Enoch Burke is shortly to be committed by gardaí to Mountjoy Prison, presumably to spend another Christmas behind bars, while rapists and murderers are set free to roam the streets of our country by a judiciary which has lost all contact with decency and reason.

The Independent report concludes:

The court will review his detention on December 18, but the judge said the teacher was free to purge his contempt any time before then.

This means that they want Enoch to lie, just as, at the very outset of this case, the principal of Wilson’s Hospital School demanded that he lie by pretending to agree that a boy was not a boy. This is the actual meaning of ‘purge his contempt’: he must sync his lies to theirs and concede that they are all honest brokers. But they have picked on the wrong man, a man of unbending principle, something they are unused to encountering, least of all in the mirror when they shave in the half-light.

These developments, though transparently unjust, may have deeply sinister undertows. A friend with a profound grasp of legal matters has repeatedly sought to reassure me that this case is ‘too big to rig’. But I have lived long enough in this unfortunate country to see some of the most fantastical stitch-ups of facts by judges, at every level of our lawless legal system, and do not doubt the creativity of the present incumbents of the Irish bench to come up with something utterly fatuous but capable of being reported with a straight face by the purchased media. It was clear from the beginning of this case that the authorities were behaving with the utmost disregard for the Constitution, the law, the truth, and every principle upon which our Republic was founded. Perhaps they thought that Enoch Burke would cave before their crookedness, in which case they were epically mistaken.

What judges in general, banging on about ‘contempt of court’ do not seem to appreciate is that there are things in reality which are, in fact, contemptible, and that the behaviour of the Irish judiciary in the Burke case is most certainly one of them. From the beginning of this case, some three years ago, they have blackguarded both Burke and the truth, delivering judgements and rulings which disgrace the bench and the legal profession, the worst of all being the previous Court of Appeal judgement delivered by Birmingham P., which reads like it was composed by a blue-haired teenager. It is what I have described as a clown judgment — i.e., one which is not ultimately intended to be a serious piece of case law, but which is delivered to meet the requirements of our judiciary’s political puppet-masters:

The original communication from the principal on 9th May 2022 to staff members, including the appellant, used the passive voice. It spoke of the fact that the student would become known as ‘they’, though it must be acknowledged that the following sentence states: ‘[t]his means “they” must replace where we would have used [former pronoun] until now’. While the reference to ‘they’ and the former pronoun are in mandatory terms, this communication seems to me to fall well short of a demand.

And again:

I am of the view this case is not about what the appellant has chosen to describe as ‘transgenderism’, and I would prefer to express my views in terms of the fact that the case is not about transgender rights. I cannot but believe that the term, as used by the appellant, is a somewhat pejorative one, as is his use of the term transgender ‘ideology’. These are phrases I prefer to avoid; I do not believe they are phrases that in today’s Ireland would find favour with transgender individuals and I would wish to respect their preferences in that regard.

This is a form of ideological genuflection at which the courts of Ireland now excel. It is quite clear from this and other judicial interventions that the rubric being applied to these matters by the courts (and the CoA is the second highest court in the land) has — with the qualified exception of the Faherty ruling — been that of ideology rather than law. What matters, therefore, is not the Constitution, but Woke sensibilities.

This has gone on long enough: three long years, 513 days of which Enich Burke languished in prison, with none but the most marginal voices raised in defence of this good man, Those in power have taken succour from this relative silence, which is why they return to the fray again and again, in the face of fact, truth, right, decency and justice, believing that, if they fill the zone with their lies, they can overwhelm the Burkes and those valiant few who have stood by them through thick and thicker. Let those among us, of whatever age, who have lived in this misbegotten and now former democracy for whatever number of decades, ask ourselves this, appropriate to our years: could something as monstrous as this have happened in the 1960s (for those who were there to remember)?; could it have happened in the 1970s?; in the 1980s?; in the 1990s?; even in the Noughties? I say, as one who live through all these decades and is capable still of remembering their tones and textures, sensations and sensibilities, that something like this could not have happened without a rising up of Irish humanity such as would have struck terror in the hearts of the evildoers.

We know this. All of us, even the equivocators who imagine they dislike Enoch because (really) his courage shames their cowardice, or who wish too display their knowledge (which is to say their ignorance) of the law, or who bear the burden of a neurotic hatred towards Christianity, or who are shamed ‘conservatives’ who have held their silence for so long that it cannot now be credibly broken, know this.

Look at the video just below of the arrival of police officers at the home of the Burke family in Castlebar last Wednesday, the second contingent in a single day, seeking to arrest this exemplary man and drag him off to the pokey for another Christmas, another year, another 500 days, maybe for life. Of maybe, as a friend prompted me to consider in a text last week, as a mere staging post to a different kind of institution, one even harder to exit in a society sliding back into the abyss of obscurantism and savagery:

Hi John, just reading your latest diary & am shocked at what the ‘judge’ said about Enoch Burke’s approach by attending each day at the school. I believe he is paving the way for him to be incarcerated in Dundrum mental ‘hospital’ where they can ‘medicate’ & destroy him, indeed, this may be their intent NOW. This is very Soviet, Gulag, Siberia — out of sight is out of mind. I fear that if this happens we will never see him again.

Yes, I too, on reflection, fear this. Enoch Burke represents such an indictment to this society, and what it has turned into, that it is clear now that the authorities are growing desperate to silence and marginalise him and his unsettling integrity. This is because the evildoers in this saga are unable utterly to mollify those dissenters among their own ranks, who are shamed to their cores by what has been happening.

Look, for example, at the faces of these ‘policemen’, these ‘Guardians of the Peace’ who came again the arrest Enoch last Wednesday evening, and ask yourself what you see there.

Is it pride?

Is it resolve?

Is it love of duty?

No, it is none of these qualities.

It is shame. These men at least have the grace to be mortified and not to seek to mask it under a pretence of earnestness or bullishness. They are embarrassed to be there, as any sentient human being would be. Their expressions indicate sympathy for Seán Burke, Enoch’s father, to whose home they have come on such a disreputable errand. These men are ashamed to be where they are, at the front door of a decent family, confronting the aged father of a national hero, and suggesting to him that there is the merest shred of moral justification for dragging his son off to jail.

Seán Burke, coming to his front door, greets the foursome, saying: ‘Enoch is entitled to his religious belief.’

The leader of the group, a sergeant, replies softly: ‘Okay.’

Seán continues: ‘And it’s really shameful that you’re here, you know. He has a constitutional right — we all have — to profess and practice our belief. And that’s being denied my son. And that’s why you’re here, really.’

The sergeant replies, in the softest tones imaginable, as though speaking to a frightened child: ‘We’re here under the instructions of the High Court. That’s why we’re here.’ He emphasises the ‘we’re’ — ‘that’s why we’re here.’ Just following orders.

The sergeant then continues, seamlessly: ‘Because there’s an order of committal for him. That’s the reason. From the High Court, from a judge [he produces a document and starts to read form it] . . . Chief Justice, yeah, that’s basically who’s . . .informed us that there’s an order of committal, so . . . thatswhywerehere [the final words delivered in a spaceless rush].

Seán Burke says: ‘A judge who refuses to honour our Constitution.’

The sergeant, ambiguously, says: ‘Okay.’

Seán continues: ‘And that refuses to acknowledge the core issue: that my son was commanded to call a boy a girl.’

The sergeant nods.

Seán Burke goes on: ‘. . . he was commanded. This is the root of this matter.’

The sergeant nods again, as Seán pauses before continuing:

‘. . . to use a ‘they’ pronoun for a boy, which as a Christian he wouldn’t do, couldn’t do. He has a Christian belief. That judge refuses to acknowledge what it’s about. This is going on for three years and we’re back again now to the same thing. A refusal to acknowledge that he was commanded to do something that was against his religious belief. And that’s really all . .. that is the situation, . .. that’s what it’s about.’

The sergeant says: ‘Do you know where he is?’

Enoch’s father replies: ‘That’s all I have to say about it.’

The sergeant seems here to prevaricate slightly, as if repeating the question in a different fashion, seeking absolute clarification: ‘You don’t know where he is?’

Seán Burke repeats his central point: ‘He is entitled to his Christian belief. He is entitled to his constitutional rights. And that’s fair, and that should be for everybody.’

The Sergeant, issuing a nervous laugh, says: ‘Okay, I’m just asking the question. If you know where he is, could you let us know, or . . . any idea where he is?’

Seán says: ‘I’ve said all I’m going to say to you.’

The sergeant nods with noticeable vigour, and says ‘Thanks very much’. He turns away, as though in relief.

But here’s the thing: these men went to the Burke homestead in my name and, if you are Irish in any sense or degree, in yours.

Is this acceptable to you? It is not acceptable to me. I renounce these men and their misbegotten mission. I believe, observing their faces and demeanours, that they are at heart good and decent men, although they failed to take what would have been the appropriate action in the circumstances in which they found themselves, representing a corrupt State in a function amounting to an act of tyranny and blackguardism: tearing up their warrant and scattering it over a Mayo bog as they drove by.

The time for permitting this saga to remain a spectator blood sport is over. Our 'Government’ is out of control. It is deranged. It is a criminal operation, clearly seeking to turn our country into one big crime scene. It is dragging the historic name of Ireland in the muck of its ideological effluent. Our judiciary, meanwhile, is craven and complicit, being transparently afraid of the thugs in the executive level of government, over which it is supposed to act as supervisory authority to enforce the Constitution and protect the citizens of Ireland from outrages such as this.

A nation, one might say, ‘where justice is known but rarely seen’, extracting a quote whole from Stacy Abrams’ 2021 novel, While Justice Sleeps.

Or this one: ‘Money and power make people irrational.’

Or, yet another, even closer to the knuckle: ‘Knowing the law isn’t about the school. It’s about the mind. The heart. About understanding what the law intends as much as reading beneath what it says. Knowing how to find one’s way to the truth.’

In this sad island of ours, Justice doesn’t merely sleep — it snores its indifference to truth and fairness for the world to hear.

Does this continue to happen in our name?

Not in mine.

In yours?

Not in mine.

In the name of our children and our grandchild who live, through as yet perhaps unwittingly, in forlorn hopes of living as we once did, in a decent, just and free country, let us rise up against these evils, in the name of God.

Ultimately, all courts are governed by what is believed in the court of public opinion, which, in the sense of enforceability and consequence, is the highest jurisdiction of all. If a government can manipulate public opinion to stir up prejudice against an individual, that individual has no automatic guarantee of access to justice, because the courts are able subsequently to behave in ways they know the public will, in its blind ignorance, accept. This is close to being the ultimate corruption, and it has occurred in respect of Enoch Burke. So relentless has been the poison directed against him that it has become next to impossible to anticipate justice being ceded to Enoch. But it is still possible to turn this juggernaut of wickedness around. It’s not entirely too late to curtail this rottenness, but there is no time left for the toleration of further abuses. The next move falls to us — the People — who must put an end to this appalling circus by denouncing and disowning it, by declining any longer to participate, even by our silences, in the attempt to intimidate Enoch Burke into silence or disappearance.

It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.

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