A judge sent a substantial legal bill and a firm rebuke Ammi Burke’s way this week – the courts are not your soapbox.
The Castlebar solicitor has been ordered to pay the legal costs of both sides in her failed effort to overturn a decision by the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) over her complaint that she was unfairly dismissed from Arthur Cox. Ms Justice Marguerite Bolger decided Burke should pay the bulk of the legal fees of both the WRC and the law firm, making the point that this type of order is “highly unusual” and generally limited to circumstances where it is thought necessary to indicate disapproval of a party’s conduct. The decision on costs wasn’t about the rights or wrongs of the case; it was about Burke’s conduct.
The message is clear: the courts are there to vindicate your rights, but they are not a platform for you to behave as you wish or endlessly air your personal grievances and beliefs.
A solicitor of undoubted high academic intelligence and considerable legal acumen, Burke is deeply concerned about what she likes to call “the proper administration of justice” – within limits. That limit generally being when it goes her way; when it doesn’t, she is prone to ad hominem attacks, to disrupting the court, to repeating the same arguments over and over, even to accusing her legal colleagues of lying.
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In this case, she took issue with the use of a stenographer privately hired by Arthur Cox, whose transcript was subsequently shared with the other parties and the court but not with Burke. She repeatedly accused lawyers for Arthur Cox of lying over the question of whether she had or had not been invited to share the cost of the stenographer – an accusation the judge said was without merit. She was within her rights to raise the issue of the transcripts, although describing it as “a total breakdown of the administration of justice and an assault on the rule of law in this country” seems a bit of a stretch.
This playbook will be drearily familiar to Burke-watchers. Since 2019, members of the family have been on outings to the Workplace Relations Commission, the District Court, the Circuit Court, the High Court, the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court. At the most recent count, they have appeared before upwards of 30 judges. In his dispute with Wilson’s Hospital School, Enoch has come before at least 10. Their interactions with the legal system have become increasingly fractious over time; they seem to see themselves as both under siege and above the law; victims and conquistadors.
Not all of these cases have been devoid of public interest: one of the 10 siblings, Elijah, won an important ruling in favour of home schooling with wider constitutional significance. Even in this most recent run-in with the court, Ms Justice Bolger made clear that the issue wasn’t the case itself; it was Ammi’s conduct. Nonetheless, there is disquiet in legal circles at the amount of time and money their apparently endless appetite for litigation is consuming.
So will this latest, costly setback dissuade them? You couldn’t bet on it. For the family, this isn’t about any individual case, it is about a wider crusade against what could loosely be characterised as all the perils of modern life. They are convinced they see sin everywhere and conspiracies stacked against them, and that they alone are agents of truth and righteousness.
[ The Burkes of Castlebar: Who are the high-achieving family from Co Mayo?Opens in new window ]
Each of the siblings was home-educated and embarked on a career that would allow them to be missionaries of the word: teaching, the law or journalism. (Not, so far, politics – presumably far too many temptations are deemed to lie on the chicken-and-chips circuit.) Like the Plymouth settlers who staggered off the Mayflower, diminished in strength but even more determined to show the indigenous people the error of their ways, any impediments to this mission are perceived as mere tests of their faith. Mounting legal bills, fines, stints in jail, public opprobrium are the modern equivalent of smallpox and starvation – it just further strengthens their resolve.
A more relevant question, then, may be whether the courts can do anything to stop them pursuing endless legal actions and behaving disruptively. If a judge ever was to decide the actions themselves had become problematic, it may be open to them to make what is rather splendidly called an Isaac Wunder Order. Named after a man who took a case all the way to the Supreme Court over a winning ticket in the hospitals sweep he claimed he had accidentally destroyed, this is a rare legal instrument that requires vexatious litigants to seek permission before going back to court. Some now believe this is where the Burkes’ endless pursuit of their peculiar concept of justice is inevitably bound.
Ironically, at the outset of her case against Arthur Cox over her dismissal, Burke said that her reinstatement would be the only way to restore her reputation. Surely even she can now see her behaviour since has run roughshod over that hope.
Many who came across Burke in a professional environment are said to have been impressed by her legal ability, if not so much her ability to navigate the demands of office life. The travesty is that those skills are now being devoted entirely to the pursuit of her own and her family’s pet causes, to their extreme religious agenda, imagined conspiracies and bitter resentments.