Three weeks on Monday the horrific murder of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was committed, a crime that has shocked much of the nation to the core. It has also left much of the country searching its soul, searching for answers and searching for the country’s moral compass.

The perpetrators of this horrendous crime may, in due course, be identified and brought to justice. Whoever commissioned the crime may also be identified and brought to justice in due course. This is all well and good and it is, in fact, what is expected.

But if matters stop there, real justice for Caruana Galizia’s killing will not have been served. Real justice will have been served when the conditions that led to her killing and the sickening political and social climate in which people felt empowered to actually celebrate her funeral on Friday are set right.

This will not be done by platitudes thrown the public’s way by those in power. Nor will it be done by convening a constitutional convention to foist fundamental changes on the country’s very fabric. This should not be done in reaction to Caruana Galizia’s murder, she would never have agreed.

Large sections of the country are rising up to call for change, real change in the wake of the murder. They first took to the streets of Valletta, then to Sliema. Today protestors will convene in front of Police Headquarters to demand the police commissioner’s and the attorney general’s heads.

But truth be told, those heads should have been served up months ago. The former went unpunished for sitting around and eating rabbit while a crime scene that was about to be assigned to a magistrate for inquiry was allowed to be compromised and possibly cleared of evidence, when the Prime Minister’s wife had been implicated by Caruana Galizia in the Panama set-up.

The latter sat on reports by the Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit, which he chaired, which implicated politically sensitive people in money laundering and graft.

The pair should have been cut loose there and then, but they were, curiously, left in place.

Minister Konrad Mizzi and the Prime Minister’s chief of staff Keith Schembri should also have been cut loose when they were exposed in the Panama Papers. But they too were curiously left in place.

It seems to matter very little to the government that such large sections of the country have zero faith in these people, who stand charged at least in the court of public opinion with multiple counts of dereliction of duty and corruption.

The government won the snap election that had been called because of such matters and, as far as it is concerned, bygones should be left to be bygones and the country should carry on with business as usual.

But the problem is that it is not business as usual, not by any stretch of the imagination.

One of the country’s leading journalists has been murdered, undoubtedly over something contained in her vast body of work. All of Europe has its eyes on Malta and yet the government does not make a single move to attempt to restore faith in the institutions that have clearly failed the country in recent years, and which have failed Caruana Galizia too. It is simply waiting for the storm to blow over and figuring out how to recoup the situation by the time the next general election rolls around.

But anything short of real change, the kind of change that so many citizens of this country are crying out for so desperately, will constitute an even greater failing than those of the institutions under this government’s watch. 

Concrete action is needed to restore at least a semblance of normality to the country. Minimal damage limitation and burying one’s head in the sand is no longer a viable escape clause for the government. The outrage sparked by Caruana Galizia’s murder is far too great.

Prime Minister, the ball is on your court.