Cancelled Fr Ted creator's support for Enoch Burke

Support for the controversial Wilson’s Hospital School teacher Enoch Burke has come from a prominent source: the comedian and Fr Ted creator Graham Linehan.

Linehan was scheduled to perform at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival last week, but two venues refused to host his show, over his views on transgenderism.

On Thursday night, Mr Linehan performed his show outside the Scottish Parliament after both the original venue and a replacement venue cancelled it.

“I’ve never seen anything as insane as the last two days, and I keep asking people what I’ve said wrong and what I’m saying wrong in this fight about women’s spaces, about children being mutilated in and sterilised in gender clinics and about the women who are being harassed and threatened for standing up,” Mr Linehan told the crowd who gathered to see his performance.

In The Sunday Times at the weekend, Linehan said that while his views and that of Enoch Burke would diverge in many ways, he agreed with Mr Burke “100 per cent” on his disinclination to refer to a transitioning student by a different name and pronouns.

“I think it is a terrible lie to, I would say, embed dysphoria in a human being by preferred pronouns and pretending that someone is a boy when they are a girl and vice versa,” Mr Linehan told Sunday Times reporter Patrick O’Donoghue.

Mr Linehan said that while his views and those of the committed Christian Enoch Burke on the use of preferred pronouns were similar, on most issues their views would not be aligned: “That’s the weird thing about this fight,” he said.

“Because it’s so insane, the people you stand with are just people who refuse to accept an insane situation, so you end up being bedfellows with people who you normally wouldn’t really have anything to do with,” he said.