School teacher Enoch Burke has been in prison since the 5th of September last, that’s two days over three months.
The circumstances surrounding his incarceration have at this stage been widely reported on, but there has been relative silence on the nature of the legal provision which legitimises keeping someone – who hasn’t committed a criminal offence – in jail indefinitely.
When a judge finds that a person is in contempt of a court order – that they are unwilling to obey it – the person can be held in prison until he or she makes an undertaking that they will obey.
It’s a common law mechanism for forcing someone to act against their conscience in exchange for the restoration of their liberty – rather draconian if you ask me.
This type of ‘legal remedy’ to conscientious dissent is – in my view – not exactly compatible with the compassionate society that Ireland in 2022 claims to be.
As Christmas approaches I am keenly aware of the emotional distress Burke’s family are likely suffering. Although they have expressed solidarity with his moral convictions, having a loved one locked up – potentially forever – is not something I would wish even on the worst of enemies.
Although the circumstances were vastly different, my own mother was imprisoned in the Dóchas centre in Mount Joy prison for a total of eight months, also on civil contempt.
It would be difficult to relate the history of how a nurse and midwife who has dedicated her professional career to helping others found herself neighbours with high profile criminals like the late Catherine Nevin and the so-called scissor sisters.
In short, my mother refused to obey an order for us to be evicted from our family home – where both she and I were born and raised – and which has been in our family since my great grandfather came there in 1879.
My mother is a strong woman but the long incarceration took its toll on both of us. She eventually contracted shingles and purged her contempt in fear of her deteriorating health.
The first occasion on which she was arrested in Bray Circuit Court she had nothing with her. She was taken to a cell in the court by Gardaí.
I remember the shock I felt and how the opposing solicitor hit me on the arm with a document for my own attachment and committal (to put me in jail too in order to gain vacant possession of my home) after I refused to take it from him.
Prison, we are taught, is a place where people who have broken the law go. A place where they are sent in order to punish crimes, protect the rest of society from potential further wrongdoing, and as a deterrent to other would-be offenders – and yet my law-abiding mother was put in the back of a prison van under Garda escort and taken away.
I wasn’t allowed to speak to her, even to see her. At that moment all the promises of the Irish state to protect and serve her people were meaningless to me.
Many of us may see this power of the state to compel and absolutely deprive us of our freedom as purely theoretical – I did until I saw my mother led away and I was smacked on the arm with those documents.
I was a first year college student at the time. Anyone who has a loved one in jail knows how difficult it is to be allowed to visit them or bring them items – that’s all I could do to try and comfort her.
She was allowed one short phone call a day and one visit a week.
Visits must be pre-booked by calling the prison in advance. They only answer the phones at specific times each day and getting through was often a struggle.
Once a visit was arranged I had to travel to the jail, check in, put my personal belongings in a locker, wait for a security screening, and then wait in the visiting room until my mother was called from her cell.
For the families of people convicted of crimes serious enough to warrant a prison sentence this process must indeed be horrible, but when crimes are committed society is owed a debt – it’s something we all understand.
In those circumstances the family at least knows when approximately their loved one will be able to rejoin them – when life can resume it’s natural rhythm – but where someone is held indefinitely, no such timeline exists.
To know your loved one has committed no crime, has not hurt anyone, but can legally be kept in prison for the rest of their lives is as much a prison sentence for the family as it is for the person in question.
Of course, if not an indefinite detention, the question of what to do with those who, like Enoch Burke, refuse to obey a court injunction does not go away – but this writer would suggest that giving people innocent of criminal wrongdoing a theoretical life sentence is not something Ireland should be proud of.