No country sees a good man go without a heavy heart and Malta being smaller than most countries is even more dependent on each and every citizen.

Dr Joe Cassar, who yesterday bowed to the inevitable and tendered his resignation from Parliament, is widely respected for his professional caliber.

Respect for him may have decreased in the wake of the media revelations last Sunday but that same respect must have increased by leaps and bounds yesterday at his courageous move to resign.

It is very true that there remain, in the House, people mainly on the government side but not exclusively so, who have found themselves pointed at as associated with scandals of various types but they do not seem, so far, led to take the same step as did Dr Cassar.

Dr Cassar’s resignation is in no way an admission of guilt, which is what possibly the other members just mentioned are afraid of.

There is, however, a different aspect to consider. Like others in the House, Dr Cassar is not the usual, stereotype, MP. As his biography on page 2 shows, he did have a political background but he is not what we would call a professional politician, the type that came up through the ranks, through the party clubs and committees, through the grass roots.

Did this impinge on his decision? In other words, was his freshness in politics a help in leading him to take the decision he took? Or, on the other hand, has the typical politician background of the others been a factor to enable them to shrug off attacks, slurs and worse?

It is good for democracy in Malta that politicians become less thick-skinned than they many times are. It would be better if politicians exerted better self-restraint and self-discipline, but they remain human, after all.

The worse predicament a country can come to is to have its politicians live in denial and refuse to bow to the demands of justice.

There is much to say about yesterday’s traumatic events: did he jump or was he pushed? We do not know, and probably will never know. This is not a useless question: it is one thing if Dr Cassar came to his conclusion because of his own personal conscience and quite another thing if he received clear suggestions from, for example, his party leader.

In this case, however it was arrived al, it seems to have worked. Other countries have a different method: there are levels, procedures, structures, which our Parliament has so far not gotten around to get.

Once again, as we said on Monday, the country now waits to see if the Joe Cassar case can have any effect on the other side of the House. There is no question of establishing a parallelism because we are not playing at chess here. But the governing party now is faced with the prospect of seeing its MPs at the centre of the storm keeping their heads down and hoping something else crops up and the searchlight moves from them.

This will not be accepted by the country, whatever the personal political opinions of people. Not now. Not in the wake of Joe Cassar’s resignation.