Along with the many infants who started school this week, and the other children who returned to their classrooms, we have the infamous Enoch Burke who of course, isn’t actually allowed past the school gates but nevertheless has kept up his stance outside the gates of Wilson’s Hospital School since 2023.
The reasons for Burke’s suspension have been well documented, as well as widely misreported, but will not be repeated here.
Whatever his opinions and whether one agrees with them or him or not, you cannot but be impressed at his tenacity, and that of his family.
Many of us have been prevented from more extreme acts in our lives – losing the plot at a boss, being banned from a restaurant or a co-op shop, divorce – by a more measured and sane presence in our life asking, ‘Is this the hill you’re going to die on?’
Usually that phrase pulls us back from the brink of permanent reputational damage, unemployment, and regret.
But, sometimes you have to say yes, this is the bloody hill I’m going to die on. For Enoch and the Burkes, this is it, apparently, and it’s impressive.
Imagine if that kind of energy was applied to addressing the delays with scoliosis surgery, or the literally crumbling water infrastructure stifling building and development, or the fact that 79% of private homes sold in Dublin in 2024 went to landlords.
Just think what that Burke energy could bring to any cause facing Ireland, a ‘wealthy’ country with a catastrophic housing crisis and a health system that would make the healthiest wince.
Imagine, just imagine, if one party politician picked one of those causes and went hard knowing she or he would never be readmitted to the sanctified inner fold of the Party but decided that nevertheless that was the hill they were going to die on.
Oh but that one would stick their head above the parapet, secure with their generous pension, and leave us with a legacy they can be proud of.
Famine and genocide
There isn’t much new to be said about the destruction of the Palestinian people, who are being murdered fast and slow each day a very short distance away.
However every death is new, every cruelty to a child is a new and unique way to destroy a life and a family, every excuse and ‘call for an investigation’ is a new and unique bureaucratic cruelty to the evidence before our eyes.
In 1971 Gil Scott-Heron warned, the revolution will not be televised.
That it will not be spoon-fed to the individual, that realisation comes from inside, that real societal change is not entertainment and not content for the news and not something to be debated online but lived and self-generated.
The genocide, however, is being televised, and it should be, because otherwise we would have continued to think of these wars as ‘out there’, far away, ‘between foreigners’.
We would not have come to this realisation ourselves; we would have watched Netflix for the evening and switched the channel when it came to the ‘World News’ section.
Many in the Western world and particularly those ethnically white (with notable exceptions) will have spent their lives and will continue to spend their lives free of real discrimination and persecution.
It’s safe to say that many in West Cork, realistically, have never truly had someone wish us dead or ‘cleansed’ from the world for our religion or the colour of our skin or the language we speak.
In this position of unimaginable privilege, this televised genocide is as close as we will ever come to having a child die in our arms of manmade famine and forced starvation.
