Another 13 December has come and gone. Another national day in which the State, with all the panoply and pomp it can muster, awards the citizens who in the State’s belief have merited to be awarded for their services to the nation.

This time round, most of the attention was focused on Major Ripard, the valiant and long-serving officer at Transport Malta who was recently injured at the bomb blast at TM. Being still very weak at the loss of his leg, Major Ripard could not attend the Palace ceremony. But there is no doubt he was the one person who merited the award.

We may generally say the same of the rest of those who were awarded, indeed, not just on Monday but also in previous years. In what passes for Malta’s own version of knighthood and nobility, the Order of Merit and its kindred awards forego lineage and hereditary nobility and instead reward and award merit. Merit attained many times in lives of responsibility and public service. However, it is by no means an award system restricted to the public service, although many of its recipients have indeed worked in the public service.

The fly in the ointment, as we see it, lies in the way the awards are reached – through a recommendation. Every year a notice is put up urging all citizens who think that Mr X should be awarded to forward Mr X’s name and the reasons why he should be awarded to a special committee which then vets the recommendation and then passes on the recommendation to the higher reaches of the State, both on the government side and on the State’s side.

It must be said there is no foolproof way of doing this. In fact, we annually encounter stories of people so awarded in other countries, such as the UK or Italy, who are then found to have fallen quite short of the merit they are supposed to represent.

In our case, however, we still perceive the system to be open to manipulation by the self-promoters. It is conceivably easy for a person who decides there is nothing more he likes than to receive the gong, to get himself nominated by a compliant friend and then to pass all the various levels of scrutiny until he is accepted by the highest authorities in the land as deserving of being awarded.

Even though we reiterate that the successive layers of scrutiny eliminate many risks of people being chosen who would then turn out to be not so honourable as thought, we would far more prefer a system without the initial level of recommendation so as to doubly ensure that the persons ultimately awarded are truly worthy of the award.

After all, this is a country where the one real knighthood, that of the Order of St John (SMOM) while being less of a meritocracy as the Order of Merit, has multiple checks and balances to ensure that only the really worthy finally make it. Even so, the Order has spawned a cottage industry in so many other ‘orders’ of Knights of this or of that, who, the more vociferously they claim lineage and esteem, the more they turn out to be just another means by means of which those who believe they merit honour and acknowledgement, at the end get the gong they so crave for, even if they have to pay to get it.

Being awarded by the State for services rendered to the community as a whole is a signal honour, a sign seen by all, that the recipient has been truly worthy. It may be worthwhile to risk the State not noticing somebody who may be worthy than to allow one of the many people ambitious for the honour to finally get it, even though others may be more worthy of it.