The new hospital has opened to great fanfare, and people are justly astonished at the state-of-the-art facilities. It’s a great pity that while the hospital itself is ultra-modern, the thinking behind it remains antique. There is going to be a staff of thousands working on a shift basis, and yet there are no childcare facilities for the parents who work there. Yes, a hospital that size, built in the 21st century – and no space has been set aside to serve as a nursery. This is despite the fact that the hospital is going to have a hard enough time as it is trying to persuade paramedics and medics who are the parents of young children back to work to maintain staffing levels. Perhaps they think they can all rely on Nanna.

St Luke’s Hospital, old-fashioned though it may be, has childcare facilities where 10 women look after almost 50 children, with another 50 children on the waiting list. The parents of those on the waiting list were pleased that the new hospital would include a childcare centre with room enough for their children too. Ah, but man proposes and the government disposes. Just one week before Mater Dei Hospital opened to widespread acclaim, the parents of these children were called to a meeting. They were told that the area demarcated on the official plans as a childcare centre was not going to be used as such, after all. There had been a change of plans, and the space has been allocated to the Medical School and the Institute of Healthcare. So where is the Mater Dei childcare centre to be put, the parents asked? Nowhere, they were told. The children will stay at St Luke’s Hospital.

This presents several problems, not least of which is the fact that workplace childcare centres are meant to be precisely that: a nursery in the workplace, so that mothers or fathers are close to their young children should problems arise, and so that they are able to visit them in their breaks. Locating the nursery a car ride away makes it not a workplace childcare centre, but alternative nursery care.

Another problem is the obvious one of logistics. The nursery nannies start their shift at the same time as the parents of their charges, which means that it is impossible for a parent who works at Mater Dei to drop off his or her child at St Luke’s and be on time for work. The nursery opens at precisely the same time that the parent’s shift begins. Having somebody else drop off the child at St Luke’s, so that the parent can be on time at Mater Dei, defeats one of the purposes of having a workplace childcare centre: that the parent doesn’t have to jump through a hundred hoops with a toddler before getting to work, already exhausted by the strain of it all.

The doctors, nurses and paramedics who are moving to Mater Dei while their children are left behind at St Luke’s asked hopefully whether this is a short-term solution, while the long-term plans for childcare at Mater Dei are sorted out. No, they were told. There are no such plans. The children will stay at St Luke’s. So they tried being practical. Would the St Luke’s nursery open before their shift began, so that they could make it to work at Mater Dei on time? No, they were told again. The administration is not planning any such change in opening hours. OK, the parents said. Could the administration reserve a dropping-off point for the parents on the St Luke’s ring road, so that they could zip in, drop off the kids, and zip off to work – instead of wasting even more time trying to find a parking-place? No, they were told. This was not being considered.

When the government chats on about encouraging women back to work after they have children, fully aware that too many Maltese women are sitting at home frittering their lives away, it should lead by example. Lack of childcare is one of the main reasons why so many women with young children can’t go back to work even if they want to. The government is supposed to be prodding private employers into providing workplace childcare, and yet it has failed to put its own money where its mouth is. The new hospital is the largest place of work that Malta has ever seen – except perhaps for the Malta Dry Docks – and it is also the newest and purpose-built. Yet it was purpose-built without childcare facilities, though it has a great number of parents of young children among its staff.

This is the sort of thing that annoys me very much. It is not so much the childcare problem as such that bothers me immensely, but the mindset that it reveals. Those who planned the hospital incorporated a childcare centre into the design, but those who implemented the plans decided that the childcare centre was unimportant and the space could be put to more significant use. The children, they decided, could stay behind at St Luke’s while their parents moved to Mater Dei. Not only did they fail to consult the parents about this, they didn’t have the decency to let them know about it until one week before the move, letting them believe that the children would be moving with them.

Moving into 21st-century Europe is all about the trappings of modernity, it seems, but without the modern thinking that should underlie them. It is the equivalent of those people who spend thousands on a new bathroom, kitchen and bedroom, and then continue to sleep in the garage, wash out of a bucket, and cook on a spiritiera in the attic. Appearance is all. We like to seem modern, when really we are nothing of the sort. The distinct failure to plan for childcare at Mater Dei is a Freudian slip of sorts, revealing what the powers-that-be really think about women who work when they have babies and toddlers. Let’s make it even more difficult for them, shall we? Then they might finally understand that their place is in the home, and Malta will be able to boast that it is the only place in the world where women never work after they have children. If Mater Dei ends up with far fewer doctors, nurses and therapists than it needs because of this, we can always wave a couple of magic shoelaces in the air and God will provide.

***

Somebody called to let me know that the decision to close to traffic the road leading past the fireworks factory that blew up some days ago, killing five men and damaging private homes, was not taken by the police but by the ministerial cabinet. This decision was then communicated to the police and to the traffic authority.

As the person who told me this also pointed out, as did many others who called and e-mailed, closing the road to traffic – except for residents, fireworks factory workers and farmers – is not the same thing as closing it to people. The traffic signs prevent people from going in by car, but do not ban them from going in on foot. One person driving a car into that road can be stopped by the police and fined, but a sponsored walk of a 100 schoolchildren will be allowed through.

There was a more obvious point that I missed when writing my piece last week – heaven knows how, as it is screamingly in-your-face. The reason for the ban on driving cars down that road can’t possibly be the protection of life and limb. If that were the case, the police would not allow anybody into that street at all, whether in a car, on a bicycle, or on foot. Yet it is the police themselves who instruct you, when you attempt to drive in and they are there with their tickets, to park outside the road and to walk in instead of driving in. Why didn’t this occur to me? I must have been in a hurry.

So what we are dealing with here, in effect, is a ban on traffic with no reason for the ban. People are allowed to walk in, while cars are banned. Yet it is people who may be killed, and not cars. Maybe when the Cabinet took this decision, they overlooked this obvious point, as I did. Or maybe they were thinking of something else entirely. Either way, if the Cabinet decided, then the Cabinet has to give us the reason for deciding this way. If the fireworks factory is so dangerous, then nobody should be allowed into the road at all, whether driving, cycling, skateboarding or on foot, and the residents should be evacuated and compensated handsomely for the loss of their homes and their pain and suffering in losing them. There is a simpler solution, of course: putting out the order that the fireworks factory is not to be rebuilt, as the rebuilding has begun already. The site can be used instead as a childcare centre for the children of Cabinet ministers. On second thoughts, perhaps not – they’re all long past their child-rearing years, which might account for their lack of familiarity with how things get done nowadays.

***

And here’s some more modern thinking. One of my readers e-mailed me a newspaper story from February last year. It described how Rural Affairs Minister George Pullicino inaugurated the chicken-processing factory C & K Ciappara & Sons, which is run by that woman who told the press a couple of weeks ago that she doesn’t employ Africans because they’re dirty and because they’ve crucified Malta. Apparently, the chicken-plant had been “modernised”, which I take to be a reference to the equipment and apparatus, rather than to its modus operandi and to its equal opportunities employment practices. Mr Pullicino was quoted as saying that chicken-processors were expected to receive up to Lm750,000 in subsidies and restructuring funds from the European Union and the government last year.

As my correspondent remarked, the government and the European Union would do well to check that money is not being allocated to operations with racist employment policies, and that funds should be allocated only to those who uphold the European Union’s democratic principles and Maltese employment laws.

***

Once again, the Maltese have been found to be among the happiest people in Europe. I wonder at the thinking behind these surveys. As Gustave Flaubert once wrote: “To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness. Though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.” This observation came in for much criticism and is still being discussed today. Yet I can’t help thinking that he was right. It isn’t love that is a prerequisite for bliss, but ignorance.