Speakers’ Rulings in the Parliament of Malta
Noel Grima
A short while ago, I reviewed the first part in this two part volume’
I remember I was quite upset by the less than clear text, and said so in my review.
By the time I got through this second part, the text bothered me less and less. Maybe I had got used to the way the author describes what occasioned the various rulings by the Speakers of the time. Or maybe he got better at the descriptions.
In this part, or volume, the author analyses the various rulings by the Speaker from 1st February 1923 to 21st April 1924.
In most cases, as in the first volume, there would be a series of rulings by the Speaker concerning one and the same episode, so the reader gets the same account told over and over again with the various rulings highlighted in black. In other words, one must not get carried away by the sheer number of pages for many times they would be repetitions.
From 1921 to 1923 the Speaker was Edgar Arrigo and the Deputy Speaker and Chairman of Committees was Notary Salvatore Borg Olivier.
In the third session of the first legislature, from 12th November 1923 onwards the Speaker was Notary Salvatore Borg Olivier who remained Speaker till 1927, and hence beyond the scope of this book, and the Deputy Speaker and Chairman of Committees was Dr Giuseppe E. De Giorgio (also till 1927).
The protagonists of these meetings of the Legislative Assembly are still the same as in the first volume – Nerik Mizzi, Count Sir Gerald Strickland, Professor Augusto Bartolo, Mgr Enrico Dandria and others.
For all the turmoil that preceded and accompanied those early steps of the Maltese Parliament, you would not get an inkling from the mostly procedural issues that occasioned the Speakers’ rulings.
One might think that procedural issues were a waste of time, considering the dire crisis Malta was passing through, but actually they were, we might say, drawing red lines for the still infant democracy.
Still, from a perusal of these Speakers’ rulings, one may actually miss some important events.
For instance it is only through a rather low-key statement by the Speaker, Edgar Arrigo, on 4 May 1923, that we learn that in the preceding sitting, 30 April) it was Robert Hamilton (Opposition Member, Constitutional Party) who threw an inkpot and damaged one of the Gobelin Tapestries. One would have expected claims of Breach of Privilege and/or other disciplinary measures, but there is no record of this except for an order by the Speaker to remove the ink stands from the Tapestry Chamber.
Another, very different event was the drawing up, discussion and approval of the Standing Orders of the Legislative Assembly, in English and Italian, which were approved by the Legislative Assembly on 6 March 1922 and approved by the Governor in Council on 13 March 1922, as well as the Joint Standing Orders of Both Houses of Parliament which were approved by the Legislative Assembly and by the Senate on 2 June and 20 July 1922 respectively and approved by the Governor in Council on 31 July 1922.
The book is also remarkable for the variety of unparliamentary epithets bandied around, of which the most popular seems to have been ‘lustrascarpe’ (boot-shiners) while the most original, in my opinion at least, was Dr Alfredo Mattei (Government Member, UPM) calling Sir Gerald Strickland “Chem int chiesah”.
This brings me to the subject that seems to have been the most incendiary among those discussed and also intractable: the language question into whose vortex were sucked in politics, religion, education, etc.
On a final note, I see that the present Speaker, barely a year in office, has issued a booklet with his rulings. I would hate to see the monumental opus began by Prof. Mangion interrupted or getting waylaid.