Werner Langan, who leads the European Parliament’s PANA Committee, has written to the government, asking that the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, Keith Schembri, travel to Strasbourg to appear before the committee and answer the questions that he failed to answer when the PANA Committee met in Malta last month. That is obviously not going to happen. Right now, Keith Schembri is in survival mode.
He is not obliged to appear before the PANA Committee and so he will not. An innocent man will go, but Schembri is not in that position, so he will avoid it. This is embarrassing for the government, but the government is now past caring. Its main priority is not good governance but being re-elected to power this year so that it can complete its deals and some of its members avoid investigation for another five years.
Konrad Mizzi was supposedly stripped of the energy portfolio last year, when he was found to have had set up a company in Panama and a trust in New Zealand. Hang on, that’s not strictly accurate. When I broke the news that Mizzi had organised all this for himself, the Prime Minister and his government remained unfazed. In fact, just two days later, Mizzi was elected deputy leader of the Labour Party. It was as though none of it mattered. Later, when the same news was broken through the Panama Papers revelations, lip service had to be paid to the seriousness of it all.
And that’s when the Prime Minister announced that Konrad Mizzi was no longer Minister of Health and Energy. But he would henceforth be Minister in the Office of the Prime Minister. Chris Fearne got to be Health Minister and the Prime Minister said he would be responsible for the energy portfolio. The reality is that Mizzi has remained responsible for energy and addresses conferences on the subject. This is so awkward and embarrassing for Malta, but the Prime Minister and Konrad Mizzi are so brazen that they are not embarrassed at all.
Malta saw the introduction of divorce legislation in 2011. This now seems like a lifetime ago, but in reality, it is anything but. It is practically only yesterday that we voted in the referendum to say Yes or No to divorce in Malta. Looking back, it was ridiculous. Why should we have had to do that? How could anybody possibly countenance a country without divorce legislation?
All sorts of thing were said back then, for and against it. It was ludicrous. It was never a matter of for or against it. The dissolution of marriage is a fact of life. A contract signed can be reneged upon and got out of. Disaster was predicted but disaster was never possible. Malta was not in a position to reinvent the wheel. Last week, the divorce statistics were published. There have been 1,500 divorces in Malta so far – hardly the end of the world. I am surprised that there have been relatively so few.
I weep for all the lives ruined or irremediably damaged because divorce came too late for them, leaving them unable to remarry. There are women I know who, despite living with the same man for more than two decades and bearing his children, have been left with no rights. They couldn’t formalise their union with marriage because either they or their man was married to somebody else already in a country without divorce. How terrible. How sad. The Maltese government since the 1960s has so much to answer for in this respect.
I weep for young British people. Their government triggered Article 50 last week, severing their links with the European Union and truncating their potential on the European level. The things young Britons took for granted – living and working anywhere in the European Union and making their life wherever they please – are now gone forever. Their horizons are limited to the island on which they live, and as Maltese we should be sensitive to how terrible that is.
Not that many Maltese people have chosen to leave Malta and make their life elsewhere in Europe since 2004, but what matters is that the potential and possibility are forever there, and that makes us feel safe. My generation knows only too well what it means to be trapped on an island and, because of that, I have the utmost compassion for those UK citizens who are young enough to want to make something different of their lives.
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