For a family with a monastic determination to keep the modern world at bay, the Burkes spend a fair amount of time courting its attention. Hardly a week goes by without several of the Castlebar clan turning up in some location where they are likely to be captured on camera, and where there will hopefully be a few journalists whom they can pointedly ignore.
The playbook is well established: they arrive with placards, start shouting, frequently make enough of a ruckus to get themselves forcibly removed, often incurring a dramatic tumble in the process – which gives them yet another item for their very long list of grievances.
So there they were this week, four of them off on a US tour, conveniently booked on the same flight to Washington as several journalists. A few media outlets dutifully obliged, describing how Irish officials were on “high alert” and speculating that they had been invited to meet Elon Musk. Martina, Seán, Ammi and Isaac eventually materialised in earthly form, popping up like grim sentries outside security barriers to the White House compound.
It wasn’t clear what they were hoping to achieve: was it a fundraising trip? An evangelical mission? Part of a plan to take their protest on the road? Might they erect a merch stand selling MIGA hats? For a while, it looked as though something unprecedented might unfold: that is to say, it seemed nothing much was going to happen.
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On Thursday night, with the distressing prospect that the US media might not even notice them now looming large, they put on their best suits, frocks and glossy tights and infiltrated an Ireland Funds dinner attended by Taoiseach Micheál Martin and various dignitaries, from which they had to be hustled out by security amid the usual dragging and screeching. Martina ended up on the ground and lost a shoe.
Outside, there was more indignant shouting – mostly from mother Martina – about children being taught “LGBTQ+ bisexual transgender as fact”. “Perversity,” interjected Ammi. There followed more loud utterances on plans to deduct Enoch Burke’s teacher’s salary to pay his court-imposed fines – a salary still being paid in full, 2½ years into his suspension. (I wouldn’t count on too much sympathy from Musk on that score.)
And that was it. There was no invite to the shamrock ceremony. No offer of a test drive in a Tesla. No selfie with Musk. Conor McGregor did much better than that and he didn’t even have a placard.
It was notable that, as they were roaring into the void about “transgenderism”, the speeches and laughter at the event carried on in the background. Nobody batted much of an eyelid at the Burkes, and why would they? It takes a lot more than a few placards and an extreme religious disposition to mark you out over there as a freak or someone worthy of even a passing glance.
In the increasingly deranged and disunited States of America, the adjective that best describes their weird views, victim complex and arrogant manner is “presidential”.
On their strange obsession with transgender people, who are a tiny and vulnerable minority of the population, they are at one with Donald Trump, who broke off in the middle of his press conference with Martin at the White House to ramble incoherently and with an almost impressive lack of self-awareness about women being “demeaned”, adding “everything’s transgender. Everybody transgender. That’s all you hear about.”
Trump also shares a disdain for the judicial system with members of the family – all seem to regard the court as useful when it does what they want, and corrupt and illegitimate when it doesn’t. Both Trump and the Burkes want the rules applied assiduously and rigorously, until the rules don’t suit them, at which point they claim that they are doing God’s work.
And they all insist they despise the media, while being unable to resist the glint of a lens or the magnetic allure of a microphone. When they are asked questions they don’t want to answer, they respond with playground insults. When reporter Louise Burne asked Martina Burke who had paid for their flights, Burke turned to her and said “it would suit ya better to get a job stacking shelves”. The champion of Christian values then delivered an invasive diatribe on the subject of the private life of a child who had been a student in Enoch Burke’s school.
The Burkes’ disregard for protocol when they disrupted the Ireland Funds dinner won’t raise an eyebrow in a city in which, just a week earlier, the president and vice-president themselves threw niceties out the window to rudely berate the president of another country, Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Ukraine, in the Oval Office.
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The Burkes would have much to talk to vice-president JD Vance about, too. While he is a deeply conservative Catholic and they are evangelical Christians who don’t belong to any established church, they share many beliefs with him: a reverence for large families, a distrust of the modern world, a desire to control women’s fertility.
But the common ground between the Burkes and the Trump administration goes deeper than any of this. Both appear to sincerely believe they are on a divine mission from the Lord himself. Trump has said he was “saved by God” to make America great. Martina Burke believes she has a direct line to, and mandate from, her creator, and perhaps even that she and her family are the only true Christians on Earth.
So the Burkes are going to have to try much harder if they want to make a proper scene in the US. Forget railing about the mainstream media or the establishment: there, they are the establishment.
