A fireworks factory blows up, killing two men and critically injuring others, one of who is severely burned, and everyone speaks as though it were an act of God. The media reports employ hushed and respectful tones; the Archbishop rushes to the scene and gives the last rites to those who have died. MPs from both sides of the house drop what they are doing and race down there to commingle and commiserate with the relatives of the dead and the injured – perhaps because they genuinely give a damn, or perhaps because it’s an excellent public relations opportunity. Words like ‘tragedy’ are used to describe what has happened. Journalists note down the fact that this fireworks factory blew up on the same date – the fourth of July – some years ago, and instead of asking why it has happened yet again, they speak of coincidences, as though we should look for some divine or supernatural meaning in the confluence of dates. Man-made, man-stored, man-tampered-about-with explosives go off in a man-constructed shack, and we behave as though in the face of a heavy storm or other act of raging nature, before which we lie helpless.

Our fatalism is boundless. We lay everything at God’s door, and attribute the disasters for which man is wholly responsible to the will of God. Even now, there are people probably muttering words of consolation and comfort that include the phrases ‘ir-rieda t’Alla’ (it’s God’ will) and ‘hekk ried Alla’ (that’s what God wanted). No. No, no, no, and no again. This was entirely man’s doing, and the appropriate word to describe it is not ‘tragic’ but irresponsible. God does not force men into shacks to fiddle around with dangerous chemicals they barely understand, in shockingly primitive conditions. God does not order us to develop an obsession with fireworks and feasts. God does not encourage his representatives to condone or encourage that obsession, particularly in men with more earthly responsibilities, like wives and small children. God does not stop the government from laying down fierce and uncompromising regulations for the manufacture of fireworks. Man does all this. We do, with our fatalism, our contempt for the value of life in the face of pseudo-traditions, and the reluctance of the authorities to rock the boat even when that boat is inevitably rocked by a huge explosion that kills people, maims others, and leaves children fatherless.

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Fresh widows and orphans have been created by Monday’s blast. One of the dead has left behind a woman who will have to fend for herself and for her three small children, who include a baby of just nine months. He escaped death once. He took a day off work at the drydocks to visit his wife and their first-born baby in the hospital, and that day the Um El Faroud blew up, killing one of his friends and eight of his workmates. Thirteen years ago, his closest friend died in an explosion at the very same fireworks factory, but like many of us in other circumstances, he must have believed that it would never happen to him. Why, otherwise, would he have taken such terrible risks when he had so many responsibilities? His wife, parents and siblings used to beg him to give up his very dangerous hobby, but as his wife told a newspaper, it was an obsession. “He would smile at us and not utter a word,” she said, “then still do whatever he wanted. I used to be worried about him, but he would just shrug his shoulders and tell me that if God wanted him, he would find him.” Yes, indeed – it’s God’s fault, isn’t it, for wanting him. He promised his wife that this would be the last year he would make fireworks, and she bitterly told a journalist that he had kept his promise.

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One of the injured has been married for just a week. It’s his honeymoon period, but there he was, narrowly escaping death in a fireworks factory explosion. These men, so keen on pursuing their life-risking hobbies, seem not to have understood that personal freedom ends where personal responsibility begins. If a woman with three small children, one of them a babe-in-arms, were to spend her afternoons and weekends playing with gunpowder, she would be condemned as hideously irresponsible. She wouldn’t even think of doing it, not because of the fear of condemnation, but from worry at leaving her children motherless. It remains a mystery to me why, still in our macho culture, men do not even begin to think the same way. The drive to play with gunpowder comes first, pushing out all other concerns.

I hope nobody makes any attempt to set up the dead as heroes or martyrs in the cause of the village feast. Of course, one should be tactful in the face of the grieving, but this is the appropriate time for leaders, priests and teachers to illustrate an important lesson: when you are responsible for others, you have no right to take risks with your life or your health. Those others come first. If you are a single, childless person, with not even any parents left to grieve for you, by all means go off and risk getting killed. It’s a free country, and no one can stop you. But if you’re not a single, childless person and you do this, then you are grossly irresponsible, and even if you have parents, then you have no right to risk putting them in a position where they will grieve and mourn for the rest of their lives.

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There’s too much of this selfishness about. So many Maltese men, right across the social spectrum, appear to live in the belief that even after they marry and have children, they have the ‘right’ to keep on behaving exactly the way they used to before. Then, after some years, either she gives up in a smouldering rage and leaves him, or he leaves her, for failing to accommodate him like his mother accommodated his father. How many people like this do you know? Counting them, I ran out of fingers and toes. Men who behave in a more enlightened manner, instead of like the typical southern Mediterranean boor, are dismissed by other men – and shockingly, even by some (envious?) women – as a henpecked and harried msieken (poor thing).

This behaviour is learnt. It is taught. It is pushed down from father to son, from mother to son. Daughters watch, and either they learn their place in life (put up and shut up) or they become determined never, ever to find themselves in that position. We tend not to think through moral issues properly, and so, where we do not have rigid and obvious guidance from our religious leaders, we become confused. For men to put their lives at risk when they are responsible for the well-being of their children, and when they have obligations towards their wives, is just such a moral issue. Avoiding discussion of it is going to help no one, but rather the opposite. Behaving as though fireworks factory explosions are acts of God is just such avoidance. Tomorrow will come, and the subject will be changed. In a couple of years’ time, another factory will blow up, more men will die, more widows and orphans will be created, and we’ll sit around shrugging our shoulders fatalistically, hapless and helpless to do anything about an erratic God who chooses to set a fire from time to time, possibly for his own amusement in the boring heat of summer.

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There is no room for complacency. There have been 27 fireworks factory explosions in the last 10-and-a-half years. Twelve of these explosions occurred in the last three-and-a-half years alone. There were seven fireworks factory explosions in 2002. In all, these 27 explosions have killed 12 men and maimed another 18. What, exactly, is the point of all this?

Two courses of action are immediately and obviously necessary. One of them is to drum home into the heads of men the fact that when they have wives and children, those wives and children must come first, and they should put aside any hobbies that are potentially life-threatening. It is also essential to make these wives see that they have to put their foot down; they should not let anyone convince them that it is perfectly acceptable to have a husband who plays with gunpowder for his amusement, risking death.

The other course of action is something only the government can do: legislation and regulation. This is not at all contradictory to the issue of personal freedom and the fact that if single, childless men wish to risk blowing themselves up, they should be allowed to go right ahead and do so. When others are put at risk, and when the resources of the country are burdened by these fearsome hobbies, then there has to be strict control. As the head of the Special Care Baby Unit at St Luke’s Hospital said about IVF, in Malta you need a licence and commitment to strict regulations to run a pizza take-away, but if you want to start babies off in test-tube, you are left to do as you please. It’s the same with fireworks factories, and I find it fascinating that two of the procedures that most require regulation – fireworks and IVF – are the very two where the manufacturers are more or less left to muddle along according to their own devices.

Passers-by or visitors may be killed when a fireworks factory blows up. I seem to recall that this actually happened some years ago. Rescue teams have to deal with the consequences, sometimes putting their own lives and health at risk. The accident and emergency department and the intensive care unit at the hospital are placed under further strain, diverting attention and resources from those who are in there through no fault of their own. And for what? I think I had better not go into that. I’ve said enough already.

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St Catherine’s Street in Xwieki, between Naxxar and Gharghur, has had access restricted only to residents of that street for some years now. The reason? There’s a fireworks factory there, and apparently cars driving up and down that street constitute a hazard. I wasn’t told whether the hazard is to the fireworks factory because unstable chemicals may be set off by the vibrations, or whether the hazard is to the drivers of those cars, who may find themselves inadvertently blown to smithereens. Either way, it’s an odd manner of looking at the situation. If the fireworks factory constitutes a danger, remove the fireworks factory, not the people who need to use the street.

No, it’s not the same thing as the Um El Faroud explosion at the dockyard – not at all. The men who died then were employees of the dockyard, working to earn a living, to support their families. They died through no fault of their own. It had nothing to do with irresponsible behaviour on their part. And incidentally, even then the media and general commentators behaved as though Fate were to blame, rather than the irresponsibility and shortcomings of human beings – in this case, not the victims themselves. I had written an article then, after speaking to some of the new widows, pointing out that somebody had to be held accountable, and that the widows and orphans were in a position to sue their husband’s employer for damages. I was furious at the way the employer in question – Malta Drydocks – was itself behaving, as though the explosion on the Um El Faroud was an act of God, rather than the result of man’s irresponsibility. The widows eventually made claims for damages, but I lost track of the outcome.

Yes, that was a very different case. The men who died in the Um El Faroud explosion were not practising a hobby or helping out voluntarily. They were working to earn a living, to support their dependents, in an environment which health and safety regulation and their employer should have made risk-free. They did not go to work every day in the knowledge that they might be blown up. Their wives were able to sue their employer for damages, though no amount of damages makes up for the loss of a husband and father.

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Because the people who potter in fireworks factories do so as a hobby or voluntarily, their relationship with the factory is beyond regulation. If they die in an explosion, that’s it. Their wives cannot sue their employer because there is no employer. Nor can these women obtain any insurance money. Fireworks factories are uninsured. No insurer is going to take on the huge risk of a fireworks factory that might explode at any moment, killing and injuring people, and which operates in a virtually unregulated environment. For fireworks factories to be able to obtain insurance, they have to operate within the strict parameters that the government may eventually find itself willing to lay down. There are fireworks factories all over Europe. They don’t operate like this, for heaven’s sake: in a couple of shacks in the fields, with no professional chemist in attendance, and with barely educated amateurs sorting one powder from another by tasting them.

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Fireworks are not a tradition. They are a recently-acquired obsession. Traditions, as opposed to habits and fierce compulsions, are built up over centuries. A hundred years ago, the vast majority of the Maltese were staggering along on the edges of survival, with not enough money for food and basic amenities. They were not making fireworks for fun or looking at them during the village

feast. Please, let’s remember this. And let’s

grow up.

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My arguments about why a referendum on the rent law is an ill-conceived idea with great inherent risks for landlords and landladies have unleashed a torrent of vengeful hatred from the tin-pot politicians at Alternattiva Demokratika. Not having thought the matter properly through, they seem rather upset that somebody else has done this thinking for them. Their defence, instead of tackling each of my arguments and pointing out why they are wrong, was to sit down and vomit a deluge of ad hominem muddle-headedness, which only served to convince me further that they don’t know what they are doing. They couldn’t even give a straight answer to the question: how do you know that more people won’t vote No than Yes? They don’t know, of course. They are just going to run the gullible headlong into a mess, the most likely result of which will be a shattering No vote that will put paid to the hopes these property owners have. Once the people speak in a referendum, the government cannot ignore the result. We have been through this already with Alfred Sant and the EU. Harry Vassallo’s idea of a sensible answer to my articles about the matter was, in paraphrase, to tell his readers that they should ignore my remarks because he doesn’t like my face, my personality, or my work. Ar’hemm, hej. Well, that’s a lot easier than sitting down and trying to tackle those comments one by one, which might have led him into an unsightly tangle.

Oh and by the way, Harry – I haven’t been commissioned by anyone to counter your campaign for a referendum on the rent laws. Paranoia is a bad sign in kings and politicians. I just happen to think that your campaign for a referendum is a lousy idea, that it is based on a cock-a-doodle-doo understanding of how the property sales and rental market works, and that it will cause more damage than good to landlords. Unfortunately, even though he poses as the God of Enlightenment, Harry Vassallo is just a typical southern Mediterranean man who can’t take criticism from a woman – particularly not if she thinks more clearly than he does.