Pat on Sant`s back

I know, I know how you feel. If you read another word about the visit to Malta of Pat Cox, the President of the European Parliament, you will turn to the obituaries for something a bit more lively. If you see his limpid blue eyes and hear his even more limpidly expressed thoughts on television one more time, you would seriously consider switching to Nancy peddling her griglioso on her teleshopping show for intellectual and aesthetic stimulation.

I have half a mind to agree. Some media, this paper not included, do give rather indiscriminate and distended coverage of every European politician`s visit, whether he is light-weight right winger hauled over here by the Campaign for National Independence or a high-ranking power broker on a continental level. The rather colourless procession of these foreign politicians is appearing a bit too long.

Pat Cox, however, was different, really different. It is not that he said things we did not know or that have not been said on Maltese soil by his continental colleagues. His unique political sparkle had more to do with how he said those things. Somehow, he managed to communicate and relate in a way few others before him did. He was the first European politician to speak as if he were Maltese.

I tried to figure out how he managed to accomplish this formidable task. Perhaps it is his background as a former economist and television journalist which makes him such a good communicator. True, but it could not have been just that.

On a somewhat deeper level, it might have been that the Maltese and the Irish share certain cultural traits and so we understand each other a bit more instinctively. Think of the nasty proverb: Put an Irishman on the spit, and you can always get another Irishman to baste him. Or think of the barb from Samuel Johnson, the British lexicographer: "The Irish are a fair people; they never speak well of one another." Wouldn`t you say that we fit that bill as much as the Irish?

On a somewhat more positive note, Lydia Child, the 19th century American abolitionist, had this to say about the residents of the emerald isle: "Not in vain is Ireland pouring itself all over the earth... The Irish, with their glowing hearts and reverent credulity, are needed in this cold age of intellect and scepticism." Think of the massive generosity of the Maltese towards people who need it. Think of the success of the Maltese diaspora in Canada, America, Britain and Australia. And, alas, think of our frenzy to subscribe to any hair brain idea so long as it tallies with our prejudices. And then, of course, there is the common Catholic tradition and British colonial past.

Pat Cox, however, found sympathetic local ears for a particular political virtue: a bristling sense of clever but generous directness. Malta, like Ireland, he said, is neutral. Yet he joked about how the Irish are still trying to figure out what it means in this day and age. When he met Alfred Sant, the latter said that Malta`s EU membership might constitute a threat to either the north or the south of the Mediterranean. Cox immediately shot back: "A threat to whom? This is part of your imagination." That is what is called a putdown. And that is something Alfred Sant never hears from his coffee morning ladies.

When I asked Cox after his speech at the Aula Magna how he would respond to the local eurosceptical argument that the EU`s rules were designed for larger states rather than a minuscule statelet in the middle of the Mediterranean, he was equally direct. He used the issues of divorce, abortion and the ratification of the Nice Treaty to show how Ireland, the second smallest state in the EU, marched to the beat of its own drummer.

He also pointed out that smaller and peripheral states in the EU have historically had a disproportionately higher rate of economic development and will have an equally disproportionate bigger say in the design of the architecture of Europe`s future.

Yet, no one felt the light but deadly weight of the European Parliament President`s clarity of thought and delivery than the opposition leader. The showpiece putdown of the meeting was Pat Cox`s quip directed at Sant`s notion of Switzerland of the Mediterranean. "It is very Swiss to hold a referendum," he pointed out with his basting brush in the sauce.

This visit was not a pat on Sant`s back. Indeed, Pat was on Sant`s back.