That agreement has been reached between the government and the opposition on the measures to be introduced in order to ensure a progressively greater participation of women in political office, was very welcome news.

If I understood well, the agreement is grounded on the proposals published by government last year. They were welltaken, except by way of the consequence they could have in increasing further the number of MPs in the Maltese parliament. I doubt whether such an increase would be so beneficial.

Still, we have now been discussing for a very long time the need for an equal representation of genders in the political system and effectively nothing was done... so that compared to other European countries, we are considered to be among the most backward. This time I hope matters will move forward and fast.

There will also be a need for an objective information campaign to explain in detail how the system that is being introduced will work out. It needs be designed to truly reach everybody.

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CORONA VIRUS

Wiping out the corona virus epidemic is still a long way off even though its potential to kill may have been exagerrated. This in no way meant that efforts to control and stop it could have been scaled down. To the contrary: I have been told that if a virus like corona is allowed to “roam”, it could quickly mutate and acquire new characteristics with wideranging implications that cannot be predicted.

In fact, all indications are that defences against the virus need to be strengthened since whether it is a strong or a weak strain, the truth is that it has continued to spread.

Perhaps this is where, in the fight to contain it, calculations turned out to be wrong: estimates made about how quickly it could spread failed to calculate correctly the speed with which it soon managed to circle the globe.

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POLICE

One cannot but sympathize with those many officers who over the years have developed a lifetime’s career in the police corps, which they cherish, and now feel frustration. It can hardly feel good to witness the corps mired in scandal and seemingly in a state of institutional dizziness. For sure, among policemen and policewomen of all ranks there is a big majority of serious and dedicated officers who are saddened when the prestige of the important work they carry out in the country at large is tarnished in any way.

However, one cannot escape the conclusion that beyond the mistakes and abuses which have become public knowledge, an essential problem the corps faced was the need to modernise the methods by which it was managed and run. It never was a simple matter of establishing a training “academy” for police agents and then expecting reforms to follow all by themselves.

Among managers and members of the corps there always was in the past a fear about what modernisation of work practices meant and what it could bring in its wake. Unfortunately I suspect that such a fear still prevails as of now.