Even before I got to the Gozo ferry, last Wednesday, the shadow of death could be felt.

As I waited in the cement cattle pen at Cirkewwa, three shiny new hearses made their way to the front of the queue and waited on the quay.

Then one heard whispers among the crew that the President was coming. Later on, when the ship sailed, members of the prime minister’s security detail came to the lounge where I was.

(In recent times I have often speculated where do they hide the VIPs on board. I remember Eddie Fenech Adami mixing it with the people and sitting in the lounges, but in recent times I have been on board when some VIPs were too and I never saw them. Do they hide in their cars or is there a special hidey-hole for them? Maybe Joseph Muscat too was on that trip – how could they all fit into this hidey-hole?)

I had already gathered that Dr Gonzi was to be present at the mass funeral of the Gharb fireworks factory victims since the EPP website did not list him among the heads of government who would be present at the EPP pre-summit meeting as he usually does. Presumably being present on Tuesday at the Xewkija funeral when Joe Muscat was not must not have seemed enough to Dr Gonzi so he preferred the big do rather than discuss Rom expulsions at the EPP meeting.

There was no getting away from the funeral wherever one went in Gozo that day. Flags in all villages were half-mast and restaurants at Marsalforn switched on their flat screens to the direct broadcast (on Net and One TV) of the funeral so that people could eat and watch at the same time. The same was also happening at Xlendi.

It was on our way back from Xlendi that we bumped into the funeral cortege – five hearses preceded by police outriders and all the panoply of a State funeral.

There was enough material for social students and anthropologists in Gozo but not just in Gozo over the past days.

People in more laid-back Malta always remain nonplussed by the reactions to fireworks deaths especially in cases of multiple deaths like this. As someone said, we do not hold massive State funerals for multiple victims of road accidents, so why do we hold them for fireworks victims?

Forget the religious rhetoric that is piled on, as one would also get that in cases of road victims. But why treat people whose lives were cut short by fireworks accidents as some sort of parish heroes? There is an instant, widely-held hagiography process at work, an instant veneration of the victims, an instant massive pulling back into ranks process whose origins, I suspect, go far beyond the festa tradition and possibly go beyond the origins of Maltese Catholicism.

The link then between festas and fireworks is relatively new. I still remember ‘maskli’ being set off at Qormi’s Tal-Hlas church some decades back (early 1970s). ‘Maskli’ is what the Maltese inherited from the Knights’ period and were relatively tame until proper fireworks production took over.

Nowadays, no festa is conceivable without fireworks. Even small hamlets with smaller churches celebrate festas with fireworks. And as one saw in Mosta and Zejtun this year, a festa without fireworks is not a festa at all. It is rather like being deprived of your birthright.

In a way, it is also part of the general trend of Maltese religious feelings – out of the church towards band marches, towards fireworks. Without bands and without fireworks our festas would be damp events, flops on a major scale.

Although the church rigidly holds on to festas as its specific area, even to the point of deciding what goes and what does not go, who takes part and who does not, it is unable to stem this move outside the churches and towards the squares where the bands play and where fireworks are let off.

It is also impotent, whatever people may say, to check and control the entire fireworks sector. This is an area where only the State can legislate standards and requirements, where it can enforce rules and regulations, where it can enforce safety standards.

It should be simple, yet it’s not. It should be straightforward and again it is not. Hence, as I feel, turning the funerals of victims into a sort of State funeral is the State’s way of showing how impotent it really is.

Investors in pain

A long-time acquaintance came to see me and told me his tale of financial woe.

He lost a five-digit sum in Lehman’s, another in an issue that is having a legal coda, and another in another victim of the 2008 crash.

Apart from the tales surrounding each investment that went belly-up, I have also been negatively impressed by the way he (and others, for I have heard similar stories over the past weeks) have been treated by the regulator, MFSA and its customer service. The customer, sorry, the investor, is never right, it would seem judging from the letters these people received in reply to their complaints. In each and every case, it was the financial institution that was right.

Reading the absolutist sentences (they seemed like Doomsday judgements rather than simple statements) which condemn the poor wretches to losing their painfully-acquired investments and savings, one would have thought the cases were well and truly cut and dried. Which, as we are seeing, is not the case at all.

Perhaps MFSA and its structures have long been geared to investment attraction and this has brought them into close play with the financial institutions. But they must also remember they have a duty towards investors, especially small investors for not all can read the small print and many are pushed to sign declarations that they do not understand, assume risk which is not explained to them and get taken in by what are called ‘business advisors’ that are salesmen in all but name.

It is not just MFSA that stands accused but also other financial institutions. The spate of bond issues over the past months looked to benefit from the low interest rates but, as happened abroad with hedge funds, the risks were (are) not being well explained to investors. Some even state that their applications were turned down some time ago, but have come back after a re-jigging of the institution itself.

Many investors, maybe even I, would not understand half of the jargon used, let alone assess the risks involved.

We pride ourselves for not suffering recession as the other countries endured, and that our financial institutions did not suffer from the tsunami that plagued so many others. Hopefully, it will not be a case where it’s only a delayed process rather than a miraculous immunity from disease.

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