SCHOOLTEACHER ENOCH BURKE has lost his High Court defamation claim against Sunday Independent publisher Mediahuis over a report about his detention in Mountjoy.

In a decision published this morning, the court found that while the article may been untrue, it did not hurt his reputation.

The October 2022 article had claimed that Burke was moved in Mountjoy after “annoying” other prisoners.

It wrongly claimed that the evangelical Christian was moved to a separate part of the prison “for his own safety” due to the teacher regularly expressing his “outspoken views and beliefs” to his fellow prisoners.

In his ruling, Mr Justice Rory Mulcahy said that while the article’s contents were “untrue”, it was the case that a “reasonable member of society” could not have had their view of Burke “injured by an incorrect allegation that he had been speaking excessively about religion” following his imprisonment.

Burke is currently detained in Mountjoy prison for his refusal to comply with court orders not to attend the Wilson’s Hospital School in Westmeath, which has dismissed him over what he says was standing up for his religious beliefs.

According to the judge’s decision, the incorrect claim that Burke had annoyed other prisoners was a “whisper in the hurricane of noise” following his standoff with his employer starting in 2022.

Mr Justice Rory Mulcahy added that Burke had “behaved and was continuing to behave in a way which significantly adversely affected his reputation”.

He continued:: “The suggestion that he severely annoyed his fellow prisoners by the repeated expression of his religious beliefs is, in those circumstances, a whisper in the hurricane of noise which his actions in September 2022 created.”

In its evidence during the four-day sitting, Mediahuis had admitted that portions of the article were inaccurate.

However, it denied that the article could have hurt Burke’s reputation, claiming that Burke had already extensively damaged it himself.

While Mr Justice Mulcahy accepted that the the relevant parts of the article were “untrue”, he said that defamation law does “not provide a remedy simply because an untrue statement is made about a person”, even if the untrue statement causes that person upset.

For Burke to obtain a remedy against the publisher, he would have had to establish that the article injured his reputation.

But the court found that the article was “incapable of injuring” Burke’s reputation.

“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,” the judge added.

If the article had indeed been defamatory, the judge said that a defence based in the public interest “would not have been available” to Mediahuis.

“Although the public may have been interested in stories about Burke at the time that the article was published, there was no ‘public interest’ in the Article and therefore no basis for excusing what might otherwise have been defamatory,” Mr Justice Mulcahy said.

During the hearings earlier this year, Burke told the court that rather than annoying his fellow prisoners, they had actually sang his “praises” on his first day in Mountjoy, with one man giving him popcorn and chocolate digestive biscuits.

He said that he has an “empathetic” approach to fellow inmates, many of whom are incarcerated due to circumstances which are “not entirely their own fault”.

Burke told the court that he did not have to be moved to a new cell for his safety, as the Sunday Independent reported, and that he had a good relationship with many inmates, some of whom gave him sweets, cakes, tennis shoes, clothes, and free hair cuts out of “good will”, with “no strings attached”.