Three PN MPs on Thursday visited the Corradino construction site where Jean-Paul Sofia died and repeated calls for the government to shoulder responsibility for the tragedy.
On Wednesday a report by a public inquiry into the incident found the state culpable for allowing a situation to develop in the building industry which saw the 20-year-old die in what was an unregulated site. Sofia was in a building which collapsed during roofing works. Five workers were injured.
Later in Parliament, Opposition Leader Bernard Grech called for the resignation of Prime Minister Robert Abela and ministers Stefan Zrinzo Azzopardi, Silvio Schembri and Miriam Dalli in reaction to the inquiry's findings.
Grech on Wednesday also held a press conference in which he vowed to keep working to hold the government responsible for its role as outlined in the report.
In a press conference on Thursday, PN MP Jerome Caruana Cilia said that it was important to remember that the government did everything in its power to prevent the public inquiry from going forward and the outcome of the inquiry showed why this was the case.
“The report clearly states that the government is guilty and we are insisting that responsibility for this is shouldered immediately,” he said.
The PN will also be pressing the government to implement the recommendations made by the inquiry as soon as possible.
The outcome of a public inquiry has found the state responsible for the collapse that killed Jean Paul Sofia. Photo: Jonathan Borg“Every day, week and month that passes in which they don’t implement the recommendations, they are potentially endangering even more lives, so we are insisting that things are done properly and as they should be,” Caruana Cilia said.
PN MP Stanley Zammit said that on a recent house visit, he met a family whose home was riddled with fissures in the wall due to nearby construction.
He realized how easy it was for people to suddenly find themselves in a vacuum where no one was legally obliged to help them. And it was because of such gaps that deaths like Jean Paul Sofia’s occurred.
“The government is failing to adequately safeguard people’s lives thanks to weak and ineffective systems and entities,” he said.
The government had chosen to leave standards “on the shelf” to avoid quarrelling with the building industry, and it has only committed half measures that do not address the problem, he said.
PN MP Janice Chetcuti added that the party would be insisting on the shouldering of political responsibility because it must ensure that the way the government treated Sofia’s parents in their quest for the inquiry was also not repeated.