It can’t be much fun working at the Palace right now. Four palace officials have resigned in the space of a week. One of them has served under every president since 1979, including the truly awful, loud, rough, uncivilised and finesse-free Agatha Barbara, but he clearly couldn’t take more than a few months with Marie Louise Coleiro Preca.
This veritable staff haemorrhage seems odd because it is in complete conflict with the received wisdom that Mrs Preca is 21st-century Malta’s Evita Peron, chucking food, pennies, fridges and jobs at the descamisados of Hal Qormi and the Partit Laburista. So she must be really nice and understanding, and terribly easy to get along with, right? Apparently, wrong, and we shouldn’t be surprised if we remember the way a portentous Mrs Preca called in the television cameras and news reporters for the planned and scheduled public humiliation of the Housing Authority’s most senior official over the scandal-making lack of a soap dish in the free shower of a free flat given to some tedious free-loader who had never heard the words ‘shower gel in bottle with hooked end’.
Instead of giving that cantankerous old woman (definitely a Mintoffian – in my extensive experience, most bums and free-loaders tend to be that way) a hasla papali kif taf hi, because old people shouldn’t use bars of soap in showers as they can slip on them and jam up yet another hospital bed with a broken hip, Mrs Preca chose to give the Housing Authority CEO a ghastly rollicking instead...in front of the rolling cameras.
The President’s people management skills are probably somewhere around a level that would get her sacked were she doing something that she has never done: working in the private sector. Mrs Preca has never held any kind of job in any kind of private sector organisation. Her people management skills have been learned in those excellent forums of respect for others, tact, common sense and good manners: the General Workers Union, the Malta Labour Party and the Maltese parliament. In other words, she probably hasn’t a clue and now it’s way too late to begin learning how to deal with people who are not supplicants.
Isn’t it ironic? Just a couple of weeks after the Health Secretary, Chris Fearne, made such a big meal out of his plans to ban the advertising of infant formula milk so as to get as many women lactating and suckling as he possibly can, the Malta Union of Midwives and Nurses has released a statement criticising the Health Department for failing to engage the services of newly-minted midwives. These new midwives are looking for work, the state maternity hospital is looking for new midwives, but Chris Fearne has so far failed to make demand, quite literally, meet supply. Yet engaging these midwives, the union says, is “essential for the provision of high quality, safe care to pregnant women and their babies.”
So much for the Health Secretary’s priorities: the war on infant formula milk beats making sure those babies actually have a midwife around when they’re born. If I were top dog at the midwives’ union, I would come up with a Cunning Plan: rather than making a case for new midwives, to which he is oblivious, make a case for new Breastfeeding Missionaries, and his eyes will light up as he shouts for his pen. Think of all those new midwives and the proselytising potential for breast over – shush! – bottle, Mr Fearne. Isn’t it exciting?
But Fearne isn’t biting. The union has said in its statement that the maternity wards need midwives while midwives are registering for work, and that it has “constantly corresponded with” Fearne about “the urgent need” for more midwives. If these midwives are not employed by the Health Department by Wednesday, the union has said, it will enter into an industrial dispute with the department. I suggest they storm Fearne’s office building with tins of infant formula, ping rubber teats through his window and turn feeding-bottles into powdered-milk-missiles. That might help him get his priorities in order.
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