Regardless of their office and highbrow meetings, Malta’s authorities will possibly never begin to understand the trauma many sectors of Maltese society are going through preparing to change over to the euro.

Lost in their preparations for New Year’s Eve euro-celebrations, and self-satisfied with the many costly preparations and media adverts, the FAIR initiative and the agreement reached with some importers, they will never feel the dread that many of the Maltese population are feeling, even those with let’s say secondary school education, and those who may have voted for EU accession.

It is OK for those who do not go shopping, or who shop at big supermarkets, who are numerate, who have been abroad, or who pay with cheques or credit cards. But what about people who are on the bread line, whose meagre earnings have to stretch from one end of the week to the other?

And, as this newspaper reported two weeks ago, the bus drivers, and who knows how many like them, have neglected to take advantage of the training offered in handling the new coins, with easy to imagine results come Tuesday.

People will adapt, will adjust, they say. Maybe. But more seriously, most people, again not just the lower end of Maltese society, have complete misconceptions regarding the adoption of the euro.

Mainly, they were told that it was imposed on us by EU membership, which it was, but which is absolutely not the point of its adoption. For half of Malta’s citizens the euro is like the yoke under which defeated populations were made to strain in Roman times (hence the term subjugated – under the yoke), a daily reminder of the 2003 defeat, to which a Labour Party that was against membership, but then, for purely electoral reasons, decided to accept what it calls reality. Likewise it accepted the euro but for equally electoral reasons, not because it was convinced, but also because opposing the euro, as it tried to do pre-ERM two years ago, would have put the whole issue back on pro- and against EU membership.

People were also told that with the euro they would not have to spend time at the bank exchanging money, a really stupid concept but whole ads were based on this.

This is not being said to downgrade the many and worthy initiatives that were taken to prepare the population for the euro – the euro calculators sent to every home, the plastic coins that children were given, the help that was given down at grass roots level.

But the main arguments for the adoption of the euro were not given enough importance, or else it was felt such arguments would have been too partisan to enable a bipartisan approach to euro changeover.

As for the inflation debate, all the FAIR initiative, and the efforts at getting importers to agree to maintain prices between now and March have neither removed the widespread perception that prices were rising everywhere, nor stopped businesses everywhere from covering themselves from what they all believe will be the inflationary impact of the euro. As for the Labour commitment to tackle inflation head-on, that is easy to promise: whoever is in government by mid-2008, the inflationary hump will be a thing of the past, not of the present.

Euro adoption is not inflationary in itself, but the playing around with cents and fractions plays right into the hands of all those businesses that have been trying to raise their prices for long, but did not dare do so. Now that everything has long been preparing for the euro by positioning prices so as to make it easier to handle, everybody climbed on the bandwagon. Bad, but inevitable.

And even with all the deplorable inflation, there is no country like Malta that needed to jettison the Lm as early as could be. This puts paid to the other canard that the Lm is part of the Maltese identity. It is nothing of the sort. It is a travesty of our sovereignty, an illusion of financial sovereignty in a world of globalisation, a relic of the times when just because we added –malta to the name of so many monopolies we thought we were safeguarding our independence and neutrality, when all we were doing was creating more and more monopolies, which grew fatter and fatter on our backs, creating a network of interconnected structures of power we have still not set about dismantling them, even after so many years.

According to Paul Vella’s The Industrial Revolution of Malta (Midsea Books), up till 1857 the Maltese used Sicilian, Spanish and French coins indiscriminately along with the British sterling. Parity between the Malta pound and the sterling was enacted by law on 11 November 1967 only for the sterling to be devalued exactly a week later, thus necessitating a humiliating corresponding devaluation of the Malta pound.

It was on 25 August 1971 that the Malta pound was disengaged from sterling. And so it went on: according to Mr Vella, between 1975 and 2002, the exchange rate basket was reviewed on 13 further occasions, of which five were revaluations, two were devaluations and the rest had neutral effects.

There, encapsulated, is the short and inglorious history of the Lm we are now consigning to history. The Lm was nothing more than a paper currency, with its exchange rate set by decisions of whoever was in power, not established on the world market. It was a sorry symbol of sovereignty, a currency that was set in offices and could not be exchanged anywhere except in Malta, a currency that caught cold any time the major currencies sneezed.

Instead of this puny currency we now have the world’s second currency of reference, a currency that incorporates the strength of the Deutschmark and the French Franc, a currency that is used all over the continent of Europe, and which will enable us to better see and compare prices (and salaries), a currency whose approach regime made us slim down and tackle the public deficit problem we had been carrying with us for decades.

As for the problems highlighted at the beginning of this leader, a certain disruption is inevitable but should be ironed out, hopefully in days, not weeks. One important piece of advice (already seen in ads on bus stops): after Tuesday, think in euros only, do not try to continually convert into Lm and, if need be, convert only on certain prices. But no vestige of Maltese identity is being lost, such as none was lost (although many had shed tears about this pre-referendum) when Malta joined the EU. If anything, the Lm is a clear sign how puny our economy is, or rather was.