Beyond the ongoing controversies regarding the proposal to establish a new private University in Malta – some of which are hardly conducted in good faith – how can one arrive at a sensible view about the project?

I think one could do so by seeing which replies are available to three queries.

Here they are:

Is the concept on which the project is grounded very good, good or bad from a national perspective?

If the reply is positive: Is the project design very good, good enough or bad by way of implementing the concept viably over the long term?

If the reply is positive: To what extent should the government extend support and incentives to ensure that the project gets implemented?

If the controversies were being discussed in terms of these queries, and efforts made to obtain cool and clear replies, I believe that they would quickly cool down.

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National holidays

For many years strong political disputes persisted about national feast days – those being observed, those which should be observed, those which should be deemed most important. Another issue related to whether having five national holidays is or is not an exaggeration. The problem here was that we chose to call them “national”. Other countries observe a number of feast days that have national significance, without giving them the “national” label.

On the PN side, Independence Day became a major marker mostly because of political events during the seventies decade of the previous century. It developed into a tool for the mobilization of people.

Post 1979, Labour believed that Freedom Day would acquire an equivalent role. This did not happen. One reason was because the LP already had a popular feast, the First of May, which was a holiday but not a national marker.

Today, these calculations have come to sound rather antiquated. Most people simply consider national feast days as holidays, period. They rarely bother about their meaning and only feel concerned when the feast day occurs on a Sunday and the day off is lost.

Which is what happened this month with the “Sette Giugno” holiday.

***

Ukraine

I’m one of those who treat the news which we get about the Ukraine with the utmost scepticism. The games of propaganda and military hide and seek have continued, involving two to three players – the Ukraine government, the Ukraine separatists and Russia. One must mention too those who get involved in the games from “outside” – the US and the EU, or some of its member states.

They are dangerous games. They could spin fast out of control as they play on the tensions of communities which feel threatened or downtrodden. If such tensions are not eased, they could still explode into a war that might not remain a local one.

Already, the situation seemed to be moving towards such an explosion once, twice, three times, only for a sense of prudence to prevail.

The conflict has been allowed to go on for too long.