There is no witch-hunt on, nor is the Inquisition surfacing again. There is no overt or covert attempt to subvert the Constitution or to unseat an elected member who, in a government with a majority of less than 2,000, got 7,000 votes.

There is, quite simply, an appeal based on ethics, an appeal to a person to take a long hard look at his actions and quite simply take it from there.

On the other side to what this paper is saying, there is too an acknowledgement that in politics, as in life in general, a person can redeem himself and climb back to that level of public popularity he had risen to at one point in his career.

In the end, such is the interplay between public perceptions and private conscience; it is up to the individual conscience.

In this case, the individual conscience of Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando.

Nor is what we are saying linked or hinged upon what the current police investigations will find or not find. The dictates of conscience go beyond what can or cannot be proved in a criminal court.

This brings us to the heart of the matter: this is not a criminal issue but a political issue, a question of trust.

It was Alfred Sant who claimed, in the hot days of the election campaign, that there is a suspicion that money had changed hands for the permit of the Mistra Bay discotheque, but so far not a shred of evidence has been produced to support it.

Nor is the issue regarding the question whether development applications should be lodged regarding Outside Development Zone areas, nor whether an MP, and an MP that has been gifted with the nomination as the “greenest politician” should attempt to disrupt the ecologically fragile eco-system of the already beleaguered Mistra Bay. Nor does it intrude on the issue of the clubbing war being secretly waged in Malta with no holds barred, leading to such things as applying through a third unknown person, and bringing to the notice of the Opposition leader a private document of which only two copies exist.

All these matters are quite “normal” in today’s Malta, unfortunately, and a closer analysis of each issue would show the even more impelling argument, which Flimkien ghal Ambjent Ahjar and other NGOs are making to ban all ODZ permits and to curb all this Gadarene rush to make as much money as possible in the shortest time possible.

In the best of hypotheses, Dr Pullicino Orlando did very much what so many other people do: he tried to maximize the returns on his investment. If he did so by exerting pressure on the various Mepa levels, then he did what so many other people have done or are doing. If he was quite cavalier in his use of a consultant, who was also the consultant for MTA, there may be other persons who have done that. If the DCC board overturned the Mepa officers’ suggestions, that is surely not the first time it was done and, barring any concrete evidence to the contrary, this would have been done because the DCC members saw nothing wrong in the application. After all, only a few days before a top official of the Opposition had publicly stated that there should be more open-air entertainment venues away from residential areas!

The real, specific issue on which Dr Pullicino Orlando should look at in his conscience is quite simple: did he or did he not give his party leaders the wrong information in the crucial days of the election campaign, wrong information which led to the party leaders lacking crucial knowledge and made to look like fools when people made up their mind? Does he not see that this has now become quite simply a matter of trust: can his party’s leaders ever trust him after this?

The fact then that Dr Pullicino Orlando became quite overnight the party’s icon for the way he confronted Dr Sant probably speaks more about Dr Sant’s inability to think outside the box than about any special courage or the charisma that Dr Pullicino Orlando possesses. Unfortunately, in this as in some other cases, the electorate 2008 has proved it is far more immature than we ever thought it to be.

Which is again why the people in the public eye, including Dr Pullicino Orlando but not just himself, should try and give an example of maturity and honesty, integrity and upholding ethical standards, those same ethical standards that are becoming quite rare in Malta’s money-fixated, money-run society.