The idea of boosting parliamentary diplomacy in parallel and in tandem with the political diplomacy conducted by the government of the day has worked as an experiment.
Testimony to this are the various missions conducted by the Foreign and European Affairs Committee in recent years.
On its part, a new Labour government will set out to strengthen parliamentary diplomacy in a manner that will be elaborated upon in our forthcoming vision statement on foreign affairs.
While part of the success of our earlier visits to the USA and Libya – among other destinations – were the briefings provided by the Foreign Affairs Ministry, the only major shortcoming of our recent visit to Italy was that while our counterparts from the Italian Foreign and European Affairs Committees all had detailed briefs on pending bilateral issues between Malta and Italy, no brief was ever provided to us on Italo-Maltese relations – in spite of the repeated specific requests by members of the Labour opposition – under the flimsy excuse that, after all, there are not that many pending issues or matters of dispute between the two countries.
I fail to understand why the MFA bothered to submit such a brief to the chairman of the Foreign and European Affairs committee but failed to ensure that such information was cascaded down to us members of the committee.
This accounted for a certain lack of focus in our discussions in Italy.
Had we not met half-an-hour before the official programme started, we would have hardly had time to even draw up an agenda on the hoof.
Who goofed, and why, remains a mystery to me.
What is certain is that I will not be inclined to go ahead with our forthcoming official visits to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Dubai and India in the next weeks if such an unacceptable situation had to repeat itself.
The government should have the foresight to realise that when members of the Foreign and European Affairs committee are adequately briefed, it will make it easier to win their support abroad, particularly when tackling national issues on which a united front is most important.
At the end of the day it is the government of the day and the country in general that stands to lose when parliamentarians sent on such missions are not adequately briefed on pending issues with the visiting countries.
To be positive I will not allow such a deplorable incident to mar the success of our recent parliamentary delegation’s visit to Rome.
As crafted, the programme blended talks with statutory committees of the Parliament and the Senate, meetings at the Foreign Affairs Ministry, as well as informal but highly stimulating and enlightening meetings with such eminent politicians as Giulio Andreotti and Gianfranco Fini.
While Andreotti was a living history book with clarity of mind making up for his ageing persona, Fini who was kind enough to meet us only hours after flying back home from talks with Condoleeza Rice, gave us a good hour of his time to answer questions on various topical subjects ranging from the Maghreb, Lebanon, Iran and the Middle East, albeit in a strictly off the record manner which made the discussion even more frank and stimulating.
I was equally pleased to meet my friend Umberto Ranieri, former PDS International Secretary and now chairperson of the Italian parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee, as well as former premier Lamberto Dini, who chairs the Senate’s Foreign Affairs Committee.
Although I am not a religious fundamentalist, I found the meeting with the Pope to be an enriching experience, at once spiritually rewarding and at the same time emotional and touching.
On a different level we found our 45-minute meeting with HE Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone at Torre San Giovanni in the Vatican to be very positive, particularly when we all touched upon the importance of inter-religious dialogue and practical ways of supporting it through common fronts and actions. Bertone proved to be an excellent analyst of Mediterranean affairs as well as an understanding listener, always ready with words of wisdom and broad ranging knowledge.
A word of thanks should go to both Mgr Alfred Xuereb from the Prefettura della Casa Pontificia and Rev. Mario Laurenti, Ecclesiastical Counsellor, who ably guided the Maltese delegation. The same applies to our Ambassador in Rome and the Italian Embassy in Malta.
Let us sincerely hope that this dialogue with our Italian friends and the Vatican will be an ongoing dialogue since when conducted at the level of parliamentarians one can speak with even more frankness and act with even more flexibility than when one happens to be a member of the executive.
I sincerely hope that the government sees things this way too.
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Leo Brincat is opposition spokesman for Foreign Affairs and IT and a member of the Standing Committee for Foreign and European Affairs of the House of Representatives.