Engulfed, as our communal lives frequently are, in the many controversies that rule our national life, we soon become deadened by the noise and the conflicting screams of those who try and push us this way and that.

As if we did not have to contend with deeply embedded partisan arguments flying back and forth all over the place, we now have also this hunting referendum to further complicate matters and raise the noise levels.

Unless one is a partisan, the arguments brought forward by one side and the other make it difficult to choose.

Apart from analyzing what is said and written, there is what may be a possible indicator which side risks losing the argument: the side, that is, that gets hot under the collar when its weak point is touched.

We had one, or rather two, examples of this over the past week and, to my mind at least, they are very indicative.

Our online version put up a report on the hunting controversy and chose to accompany the story with a photo of a wounded bird.

Apriti cielo. We never heard the end of it.

As long as the pictures show hunters in a heroic poise, I think, it is all OK. But since the picture was of a wounded and bloodied bird, that was unacceptable, an appeal to the emotions. As if emotions are to be left outside the door.

It was also argued that the picture was unacceptable because it was of a protected bird, rather than of the two species of birds that can be hunted in spring, is the core of the controversy.

But isn't that the nub of the argument: not just about the shooting of the two kinds of birds but about hunting in general, about shooting at what flies, about random and indiscriminate shooting.

To those of us who are indifferent about the whole issue, this sudden, violent, controversy underscored the extreme sensitivity of the hunting lobby which wants, it seemed, to set out the parameters of the pre-referendum debate and hone it down to the precise contours of the referendum question rather than open up to a discussion on hunting in Malta in general.

The more they argued, the more a bystander understood the very fragile basis on which their arguments were founded.

Then, on Wednesday at question time in Parliament, all hell broke loose once again because the Leader of the Opposition had the temerity to refer to an elderly person who died in the corridor-called-ward in the emergency section.

It was remarkable that the most strident opposition came from two doctor MPs, George Vella and Michael Farrugia, who had to be ordered by the Speaker to desist and let Dr Busuttil speak.

I wonder why all the anger and aggravation had to break out. One understands that a person who falls ill can die at home, in the ambulance, at the entrance to the hospital, at the emergency section, despite all the efforts to save that person.

Dr Busuttil was appealing for dignity when treating ill and dying people, which, I suppose, we can all agree with.

The aggravation, as far as I could make out, consisted of having a politician (as Claudette Buttigieg had done some days previously) bring up the issue in Parliament which made the sense of loss of a dear person all the more painful.

So what about, I ask, going to all the trouble to get that family to counteract the Buttigieg claim and disprove it as happened to the first case? If it was wrong to bring up the case in the first place, it was equally wrong to go back to it and squeeze partisan issues out of it.

The more the two doctors shouted and interrupted, and the more Minister Konrad Mizzi, instead of calmly stating that these things happen everywhere and one is sorry wherever they happen, listed the improvements done at the hospital (true, if he says so) and what difficulties the present administration found at the state-of-the-art hospital (let's assume this is true as well, for argument's sake), the more an observer or a listener wondered how fragile the ground under the government must be for three senior ministers to let fly so. The hotter they got under the collar, the more their position weakened.

Fortunately, what happened next re-established hope for the country at large.

The House discussed the attack on the Corinthia Hotel in Tripoli and once again the bipartisan approach re-asserted itself as it does in times of national danger. The two leaders were in close consultation and said much the same things. The Security Committee, on which both sit, had met and analysed the attack, as much as it could in view of the dearth of information available.

Now that, I state, is something far more serious than unfortunate deaths in emergency corridors and far, far more serious than shooting at birds.

We are living in danger and this was to be graphically proved by the extreme tension caused on Friday by a single email purporting to show extreme panic among the armed forces on the basis of an unproved claim that a ship full of jihadists was in close proximity to Malta.

It turned out this was not true and there was no state of alert. The fact that the rumour spread and spread through SMS and the social media shows that the grassroots of our people are shaky, especially after the Charlie Hebdo shootings. Consider what is happening just over a few sea miles away from us, and consider too the large number of Libyans living here whose allegiance we have no idea of understanding.

Now this is, I state, a real matter for national concern, as I have been saying all the time. Now that the two sides are on the same wavelength, we urgently need to boost our national defence; we need to train our police force and the armed forces for we do not know what can happen in the future. We need a far better and stronger information service.

There is much more we need to do. I ask: does our country have any treaty, any agreement as to who will defend us if we are attacked? Think of what happened to the poor people of Kobane. Think of the poor people of Libya, one day living in peace under a hated dictator and the next living the perpetual nightmare of fighting, killing, shooting that life has become.

Are we still sure we must not join Nato, as we were in our neutrality years, when the nature of danger has changed so much?

More at home: are our laws sufficient or do they need boosting up before it is too late? Other countries, think of France, are finding that they tried to lock the door when it was far too late.

On our part, let us fight, bicker and argue on hunting or on the state of the hospital, but let us concentrate first on the more immediate and dangerous issues.

 

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