Dom Mintoff seems determined to go as he has lived: trying our patience to the limit. Unable to accept that the islands no longer pivot on his navel, he keeps trying to come up with ways to show that he is still alive and fighting. The trouble – to him – is that the only things he is fighting now are windmills.
Certainly, fighting some of those windmills has put a little money in his pocket: a third of a million liri at the last count, when the courts took that strange decision that he had suffered damages by having a power station built near one of his several homes, in Delimara. The house hadn’t been requisitioned by the government for a pittance of 10 liri a year; it remained in his full possession and he could use it or sell it unencumbered. The money was compensation for his pain and suffering in having to look at the power station.
It was an odd twist that after all those years of turbulence, outrage and human rights abuse, it would have to be Mintoff who is awarded a truly extraordinary sum for having his rights trampled upon. I might have understood this if he had had his head shoved down a lavatory at police headquarters, or been repeatedly released and rearrested over a period of several weeks, had his house raided by thugs or been shot at by State security personnel at a roadblock. No, he got that money because his view had been ruined.
The decision that the government should give Mintoff a capital sum for a spoiled view comes across as odder still when you realise that it was taken by the same court that brushed off the pleas by less significant individuals, who had been deprived of their property since before World War II – the same court, indeed, which had 15 of its decisions overturned by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. One can’t but help feel very cynical about the difference in the court’s treatment of Mintoff and its treatment of those 15 others who stood before it with their suits.
Mintoff demanded special treatment again two years ago when he refused to pay his water and electricity bill, which amounted to Lm870, and supplies were cut off. I can’t think how one old man living alone ran up a bill that size in the days before super-surcharges, but maybe it’s best not to think about it at all. Perhaps he imagines that he can still do as he pleases, and that of course the water and electricity people should continue to provide him with services he doesn’t pay for, because he’s Dom Mintoff (may the earth tremble before him). In the event, his bill – or so I am told – was paid by his faithful servant Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici in an attempt at calming the waters, and water was back in the pipes within a couple of days.
When Mintoff presented himself once more before the Constitutional Court, claiming that his fundamental human rights had been violated when his water and electricity supply was suspended for two days, the court dismissed his suit and more or less told him that those who want water and electricity have to pay for it to get it. For a moment there, I thought they might award him another third of a million for the pain and suffering of not being able to take a shower and having to read by gas-lamp – something that Mintoff’s government and that of his successor forced thousands of people in the Sliema area to do for weeks on end, during the worst heat of the summer, year after year after year. Two days without water are nothing, sir – try looking after two babies with no water in the taps in July and August, like I did, having to cross the road with buckets of sea-water for the lavatory, waking up at night to fill jerry-cans with the nocturnal trickle, and taking baths at the houses of friends who lived in areas that were not being punished. And then you have the cheek to sue.
There was more of this off-putting attention-seeking a few days ago, when this 90-year-old man who refuses to sit down and shut up announced that he is going to sue a whole lot of people and public corporations, because they damaged his sewage system and his wells. Now that he is living in a democratic environment, he intends to make full use of the fact. The next thing we know, he will be bothering Strasbourg, and we will be treated to the final irony of having Dom Mintoff stand before the European Court of Human Rights whining that his own human rights have been trampled upon. I hope to goodness that we are spared that parody.
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Mintoff is claiming that the chairman of the Water Services Corporation had promised him that bills would no longer be sent for supplies to his other homes (well, if you please) at Xrobb L-Ghagin and Marsamxett. He said that the Police Commissioner had taken away the keys to his houses at Xrobb L-Ghagin, Marsamxett and Delimara – leaving him, presumably, with just ‘The Olives’ in Tarxien. I was puzzled when I read this, and considered calling the chairman of the corporation to ask that bills no longer be sent to the sole unit in my property portfolio (the one I live in), and to ask why the former premier who threw the country into turbulence is being allowed to free-load.
Then I read the chairman’s reply, in which he said that Mintoff’s claims are “completely unfounded”. I wouldn’t attribute his bizarre behaviour to the fact that he is 90 years old. As I recall – and there is plenty of evidence in the newspapers of the time – he wasn’t any better in his 50s and 60s. At least now he does not have control of the country and is forced to behave within the norms of the law and democracy, sending legal letters, and filing suits in court.
The chairman of the Water Services Corporation said the damage Mintoff is complaining about was not caused by any public service employees, but by accumulated dirt and the roots of trees. Cleaning and maintaining our property – and that includes our pipes, wells and cisterns, is our responsibility and not the government’s – but Mintoff apparently fails to understand this simple fact of division between the public sphere and the private sphere, perhaps because for so many years he failed to respect it.
Now this is where I got really cross. The Water Services Corporation cleaned and repaired Mintoff’s wells, pipes and cisterns at ‘The Olives’, clearing them of dirt and tree-roots – free of charge – in the words of the corporation itself, “as a sign of goodwill”. Mintoff demands special treatment, and what do you know? He gets it. I trust this government doesn’t feel it has to continue paying him in kind for having brought down Alfred Sant in 1998, and making it possible for us to join the European Union. If so, then it should be framing the situation in another context: that by his actions in 1998, Mintoff partly (and only partly) redeemed himself for what went before. And he didn’t want to join the European Union in any case: remember, he was part of that silly anti-EU group with his sidekick Karmenu and Sammy tad-dokjard.
If a Labour government had sent public service employees to do Mintoff’s private work, on public time, free of charge, there would have been outrage in the Nationalist press and the independent media. Yet this piece of shocking information was buried in a news report about Mintoff’s fresh litigious endeavours, last Thursday. Apparently, it’s all right for this government to dispatch public employees to fix the former premier’s drains, instead of telling him to buzz off and pay a plumber and a couple of labourers. It’s not like he can’t afford it. Can you imagine the reaction if the Water Services Corporation had rushed off to fix the cisterns in the home of the present premier, or even of the chairman himself? But using public employees to do the private work of an ex-premier is considered less abusive. I’m sorry to have to point this out: it isn’t. And above all, it’s a poke in the eye for all those who suffered under Mintoff and who have to pay their own plumbers’ bills.
If the Water Services Corporation has taken to doing pro bono work, it should start with St Patrick’s home for boys in Sliema, for example, or the Good Shepherd Home in Balzan. Perhaps it does so already; I wouldn’t know. As for ‘The Olives’ and Mintoff’s several other homes, forget it. The next thing we know, he’ll be demanding that the State pays for his funeral.
