Going by what they have told reporters, it looks like a good third of MPs, almost all of them on the Nationalist Party’s side, will be sitting it out in the parliament bar or watching television at home when the divorce bill comes up for the vote. I hadn’t wanted to write about this again, because it’s become so very tedious, but it looks like there’s going to be no avoiding it as they continue to flog their dead horse.

Suddenly, sitting on the fence has become an act of great heroism. I’m sorry, but I actually prefer the choice of those who have said they will vote No. I’ve never had time for people who run with the hare and hunt with the hounds and then tell you they’re being ‘wajs’ or even, amazingly, courageous.

As one MP after the other pops up to tell us that he will be ‘abstaining’ – which means that he will be absent when the vote is taken, as there is no such thing as an abstention – they seem all to have felt the need to explain why they’re doing this. They hate the idea of divorce, it’s bad for society etc, but they will not obstruct the passage of the bill. They will be heroic and stay out of the chamber. Exactly what is the point now of warning about the evils of divorce when the whole thing is pretty much done and dusted? They’re beginning to sound like Alfred Sant, harping on against EU membership even as Eddie Fenech Adami flew to Athens to sign us in.

I get the feeling that in a perverse way some of them hope that the wholesale erosion of society’s church-going fabric will occur rapidly after the divorce courts are set up, so that they can get a frisson of pleasure from saying ‘I told you so’ and from knowing that they played no part in it. From there on in, they are going to be all eyes and ears, noticing changes in people’s behaviour – or rather, interpreting them as changes just because they have never noticed them thus far. They worry (or hope) that things will go to the dogs because they haven’t woken up yet to the fact that this has happened already over the last 15 years, even without divorce, that the situation is all the more appalling without proper legislation because it allows grown-ups to behave like selfish and irresponsible teenagers, which they are currently doing.

The MP who spoke most sensibly about it all was former cabinet minister Censu Galea, who told parliament that because society has changed drastically – it appears he has noticed what his colleagues have not - divorce legislation cannot be put off any longer. He said that the campaign fought by the movement against divorce legislation actually made people go out and vote in favour of that legislation. He said that he had always fought for democracy and the issue now is whether people are ready to be tolerant of the opinions held by others, that MPs have a duty to express their ideas but also to represent their constituents. He said – I paraphrase here - that divorce does not solve any collective problem, and that he is personally against it, but the common good is built on respecting differences and not on suppressing them, that life in Malta has changed because Maltese people have changed, and that MPs should face reality.

And that’s what it’s all about, really: facing reality instead of clinging to the past and refusing to see what is happening. Some of our MPs, and certainly many of those who think as they do, are like those tourists who visit a third-world country and return to tell everyone who will listen about how happy and smiling all the natives were even though they were poor. It’s the kind of rose-tinted-spectacle statement that never fails to irritate the hell out of me, and generally provokes me into saying why. But let’s not go into that.

The long and short of it is that this thing is over, and the sooner MPs of both colours come to terms with that, the better. Some of them might wish to go down fighting, but the point of such an act in any situation which calls for it is that one’s behaviour obstructs, in however small a way, the evil against which one fights. It is self-contradictory to go down fighting while saying that you do not wish to obstruct the passage of the bill. Any act which does not help the passage of the bill is an act to obstruct it, however much Jesuitical reasoning is pulled out of hats to argue otherwise.

Meanwhile, certain newspaper reports do little to help the situation. Here is The Times, yesterday, making Labour MP Owen Bonnici sound as though he is speaking about a machine which has stopped working: “Dr Bonnici said it was absolutely untrue that the faulty part in a marital breakdown would only have to wait four years rather than separate.” The faulty part? I suppose whoever wrote that meant ‘the party at fault’, and I’m quite sure that’s what Bonnici said too, in Maltese.

The same writer then went on to make Charles Mangion sound like an idiot (or perhaps he did it to himself, in which case it was the reporter’s duty to tell us), by quoting him as saying in parliament that “Maltese society was also composed of 24,700 European citizens who had a Maltese ID card...”. The last time I looked, there were 400,000+. If Charles Mangion and the person who reported his words were speaking only of non-Maltese Europeans with a Maltese identity card, then they should have said so. But that was probably a major Freudian slip by one ‘faulty part’ or the other: they are Europeans, but we are Maltese.

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