To mark the sixth anniversary of Daphne Caruana Galizia's assassination, we are reproducing some of the articles she wrote for The Sunday Times of Malta.
This article appeared in the edition of May 30, 1993.
One for all
An argument that has been put to me recently is that MPs should work hard for their constituents and that the sum total of their endeavour is sufficient.
It is a line of thought that does not impress me unduly, leaving as it does much to be desired.
If our parliament is indeed composed of 65 persons who are each ferociously guarding their small patch then it is no wonder that little or no serious debate takes place and that when matters do move ahead they move as would a man with a ball and chair affixed to his ankle.
That MPs should look to the interests of their constituents is beyond dispute. It is at their leisure and pleasure after all that they are elected or disposed of.
A more primitive assessment of the situation is that people are elected to parliament for just that reason - to fight for the rights of those who elected them - and that there can be no other.
This approach served some considerable purpose in the days when electors were underdogs, abused and consistently stripped of their rights when there were no other persons or organisations to protect them or to speak out on their behalf. Then the role of an MP was clear cut: a voice for those who did not have one.
In these later years there is a certain confusion. The role of social-worker-cum-job broker-cum-consumer-protector does not sit well with members of the House Representatives. The creation of the welfare state and the increased activity of volunteer workers has ensured that there are others to do that work.
MPs, shorn of their original relevance have gradually and perhaps unwittingly found themselves fighting for lesser and lesser things.
The inevitable has happened, and many MPs are now no longer fighting for rights but for favours, because favours are all they have left to fight for. The bestowing of favours is a form of electoral insurance, but it serves a more important purpose.
It validates an MP's existence, when that MP cannot see that the time has come to think in terms of the country and not the home patch. So slow has been the decline that many politicians are no longer capable of differentiating between rights and favours.
We should not be surprised at the petty partisan approach of some MPs. They are a historic inevitability. They are the ones who have failed to rethink their role, to grasp that it is no longer necessary nor even desirable to fight only for their own while relinquishing all responsibility toward the country as a whole.
Such MPs are an anachronism, but a dangerous one. They use their power and potential to serve the interests of the few and not the many, and so the country cannot move forward except in little fits and starts.
Local councils are in part intended to do away with this subtle undermining of national government. It is understood that local councillors will have to be of a particularly strong constitution. They will not, otherwise, be in a position to withstand the rage and ire of displaced MPs who are suddenly finding themselves without a reason for being.
Dawn l-artijiet ħelwin
The Labour Party has made its thoughts on the European Community quite clear: Malta should not join.
Yet it is difficult to understand its smug and almost unpatriotic reaction each time the country suffers a further setback in its approaches to the EC. Perhaps the Labour Party feels such developments - or non-developments- to be a vindication of what it has been saying all along.
Or perhaps it is nothing more than Schadenfreude: a perverse pleasure in the sufferings and failures of a rival.
For the Labour Party insists on seeing membership of the EC as partisan and not a national issue. It is almost as though the government is struggling to make the Nationalist Party, and not Malta, a member of the EC.
Sadly, its supporters follow suit, forgetting that they are Maltese before they are Labourites and that blows to the country are blows to us all.
The Labour Party is entitled to stick to its views on EC membership but where is that national pride which feels anger when our country is sidelined or labelled not good enough?
Can we still speak of "our country", or are there in fact two Maltas, the one not caring much about the other?
Human life at a 50% discount
How cheap life is. Magistrate Carol Peralta said it himself in court last week, and then went on to give a conditional discharge and a petty fine to the perpetrators of a Paceville attack on three Libyan boys.
One of them, the 16-year-old son of the then Libyan ambassador to Malta had died of his injuries.
When ordinary people comment about the shocking sentences meted out on the perpetrators of crime there will always be hysterical lawyers who will bleat that those who know nothing of the law should keep their mouths shut.
Yet the situation is repeatedly giving cause for scandal, and this should be a signal that the time has come for change. The meting out of such sentences may satisfy the requirements of the law, but their effect is quite clearly perceived to be inadequate.
Magistrate Peralta said that the Paceville incident was a free-for-all and that it was proven that the aggressors had not intended to harm their victims, but to teach them a lesson. To mete out a soft sentence for such behaviour is to sanction it, and to ensure that it happens again because people no longer fear the consequences.
The prosecution proved that one of the young men was armed, and that he had used a bottle as a weapon. He was so violent that he had to be restrained by those who were with him.
He was found guilty of attempting to seriously injure one of the Libyan boys - not the one who died, but a friend of his - and was conditionally discharged for two years and fined Lm100.
Six of the other young men were found guilty of attempting to "slightly injure" their victims. One was conditionally discharged for six months and fined Lm70. The others were conditionally discharged for three months and fined Lm50 each. The death of the Libyan boy is being treated in a separate court case.
Death not taken seriously
The Moviment Mara Maltija is to be congratulated for taking the practical measure of organising a public talk, in Maltese, on 'Breast and cervical screening - what the Maltese woman should know.'
Malta has one of the highest rates of death caused by breast cancer, no breast screening services except for those for whom it is already too late, and a government which is scared to initiate an education campaign because it fears being inundated with requests for screening when it does not have the facilities to cope.
This is, of course, scandalous. We can only live in hope that some enlightened politician will take up the challenge. Live in hope, that is, until we die of breast cancer.
Not independent
The Prime Minister has told an enquiring Mr Salvu Sant, MP, that there are no indications of links between contracts given by the Maltese government and parastatal organisations and the tangenti scandal in Italy.
The government and its offshoots may be as pure and virginal as the driven snow, but the Prime Minister is not the person to declare them so, for he is very much an interested party and could hardly be described as an independent investigator.
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