Enoch Burke court costs referred to be assessed

By Bairbre Holmes, Press Association

The amount Enoch Burke will have to pay to cover Wilson Hospital School’s legal costs will be referred to a legal adjudicator, a court has said.

The school had made an application for the High Court in Dublin to decide the amount Mr Burke would have to pay to cover the legal costs racked up by his former school.

Rosemary Mallon, the barrister representing the school’s board of management, said the legal firm Mason Hayes & Curran had calculated the amount as €31,549.14.

She said they had not charged for trainee hours and had also applied a “voluntary” 15 per cent reduction to the fees.

Previously, a court had found that he would be responsible for the school’s costs in relation to the long-running contempt of court case.

The dispute between the board of management of the Co Westmeath school and Mr Burke stemmed from incidents over a request in 2022 from the school’s then-principal to address a student by a new name and pronoun.

Mr Burke, an evangelical Christian who taught German and history at the school, has repeatedly argued that the direction was unconstitutional and went against his right to express his religious beliefs.

He has been imprisoned at Mountjoy Prison over contempt of court relating to breaches of orders not to trespass at the school.

Addressing the court on Wednesday, Mr Burke objected to having to pay the costs, but Mr Justice Brian Cregan said the matter had already been settled.

The judge said he had sympathy for the school and their desire to avoid the additional “time and expense” of sending the decision to a legal cost adjudicator.

But he said the work of assessing the bill of costs was “not straightforward” as there were “numerous applications” relating to the case before the courts and said it would need to be sent to be assessed.