I know Professor Edward Scicluna personally, as he shared a summer residence block with my parents in the past. He is mild mannered and a gentleman, as far as I can tell, so I ascribe his latest comment, while addressing the recent European parliamentary committee, as a frantic effort to defend a badly and hastily thought-out citizenship scheme, which is in effect barmy and decrepit in both aim and effect.
Not only has it made us the laughing stock of Europe and the world, but it has cheapened us by putting a solely economic price on our country’s citizenship, of which we are all extremely proud! It has, once again, brought to European minds the spectre of our Malta as a country of second class and maverick mediocre proportions, hungry for any way to access money – even ways that are anything but virtuous. It epitomises, if anything, the Labour Party’s inability to listen to common sense and its eternal penchant for showing that it knows more than anybody else and for reducing everyone to the lowest common denominator for forcing things down everyone’s throats.
This was a badly thought out scheme and the person who conjured it up needs his or her arrogant motives and ethos properly examined. What is surprising is that the idea made it past Cabinet and past Parliament without so much as a whimper from the Labour MPs. This means that the whole ethos of Cabinet and the Labour government should be under review. This fallacious approach was arrogantly obvious from the early way in which the Cabinet was granting at will dispensations from the Ministerial Code of Ethics, as if they owned the world and as if the sun had just come up the morning they were elected. There is a tide in the affairs of men that is independent of the men themselves. It seems that they have not yet learnt the lesson that the concepts of good and bad are independent of what they themselves solely decide.
For me, however, the comment that got my goat – so to speak – was when the Hon. Scicluna declared unabashedly that, in Malta, we do not have enough people of calibre and that the scheme was construed as a way to entice these foreign people to add calibre to our DNA, so to say. This may have been a hastily thought out way to defend the indefensible, but it would have been better left unsaid, as it is an insult to every Maltese man and woman – including himself!
Men and women of calibre are men and women of substance! What constitutes substance in mankind? Surely not buying half-a-million euros worth of passport! The Labour government insults all of us who, day in, day out, virtuously struggle with our ordinary daily lives. Calibre is found in those of us who, every day, carry out our work in a most mundane manner, facing the daily struggles in dealing with our work in the most heroic of ways and attending to this work virtuously. It is the virtue and constancy that we apply to our ordinary daily struggles that adds calibre to human accomplishments. The doctor who faces illnesses on a daily basis, the charwoman or man who has to clean up after other peoples, the lawyer who, every day, has to defend the indefensible, the nurse who has to clean up after and medicate for other people’s miseries. The refuse collector who has to remove the rubbish of others, the educator who has to struggle day after day with ignorance and a resistance to learning, the religious who has to struggle with our moral inexactness and ill disposition, the politician who has to finely balance the demand for justice with the common good. The environmentalist who has to face careless attitudes to degradation, the journalist who tries to sift through indigestible news items and make them available for public consumption, the housewife (or husband) who toils every day to maintain order in the household; the businessman or banker who wants to earn an honest buck and honestly maintain fair social-market economies. All those people who carry out their daily tasks in a repetitive and virtuous way: these are the heroic people of calibre and substance!
It is in doing all this work well and constantly that the virtue of humility is learnt and its value learned as to the fullest meaning of the word. Humility in no way means staying back or presenting oneself as a backward or incapable person. That is a false humility. It means accepting each and every one of us and our daily vocation for work, so that by accepting the challenges of our daily occupations we struggle to overcome the atrophy of the present circumstances and change them for the better. Day in, day out, we remain heroically constant in our objectives until nerve and sinew are no longer able to do so. In the Christian tradition, for those who hold to it, real humility is easily translated essentially into accepting the will of God in our lives. Here is the essence of greatness and calibre!
Do we have people of calibre in Malta? Of course we do, and we have it in abundance in all those who present themselves every day for their daily work responsibilities. I would say that we have greatness and calibre in as great, if not greater, a measure as many other countries I have been to.
The ethos of our working men and women is second to none, and is a result of the tradition of hardworking forefathers and mothers which has been handed down to us. Let us not cheapen this inheritance by selling it cheap and definitely by not denigrating it before the whole world by referring to it as ‘of low calibre’. It is high. It is, indeed, one of the highest in the world!
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