One article that appeared in The Times and one news item, both of which appeared on the same day, reflect the title of this week's contribution. Even though the article and the news item are totally unrelated, they both lead to one reflection - for how long can this country continue to discard human resources that can and want to make an important contribution to its economic and social well-being?

I purposely make reference to the country and not the government, not to let the government off the hook, but rather because we all need to be sensitive to such situations. We all need to appreciate and understand that we are too small to be able to afford situations where we do not maximise the contribution of each and every person who is fit, capable and willing to work.

The article I am referring to is the one that appeared last Friday, written by Philip Grech. In his article, Discrimination Begins At Home, he wrote about his son who was born with an intellectual disability.

Mr Grech's claim is that there are a number of young persons who, for the last years, had hoped that there could be a future for them, in spite of their disability, because the buzz word has been "inclusion". Unfortunately, this has really turned out to be a buzz word because MCAST has closed its course for intellectually disabled persons and because intellectually disabled persons who are beginning to knock at the door of work are finding this door closed.

It appears to be immaterial that such people are willing to make a contribution to our economy and that we have had not a few but several examples of the extent to which such persons are capable and fit to work. It is economically wasteful and, I dare say, immoral that we seek to provide public sector employment to people who have an attitudinal disability towards work because they are downright lazy, they skive off work, and go to great lengths to spend their days doing nothing while still getting paid thanks to our taxes, and then we exclude persons who want to and can make a valid contribution to the economy just because they have an intellectual disability.

Mr Grech quotes the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which says that "state parties... shall enable persons with disabilities to have effective access to general technical and vocational guidance programmes, placement services and vocational and continuing training". Placing such people in a ghetto goes against the spirit and the letter of this convention. The least that can be done is to reverse the decision to exclude intellectually disabled persons from mainstream vocational education and training and adopt a proactive approach towards the placement of such persons in a job.

During my term as chairman of the Employment and Training Corporation we had adopted such an approach and it had yielded the right results. Unfortunately at that time I also had to contend with the anti-inclusion views of technocrats from the Education Division who considered anyone that would not pursue a course of studies at the Junior College or Sixth Form as second-class citizens. Evidently the view that not all men are born equal is still prevalent in this country, with the result that we are wasting our best resource - people.

The news item I referred to in the first paragraph relates to the announcement that Eurostat has certified the correctness of the revisions that had been made to the GDP data by the National Statistics Office. Eurostat reached their conclusion to certify the correctness of the new data after a team of EU officials had examined these revisions. One needs to remember that, when the NSO had made these revisions, there were some who had questioned them. An orchestrated smear campaign was conducted against the person occupying the post of director of the NSO, who eventually resigned from his post.

There is no doubt about the competence of this person, having spent a long number of years working at the Central Bank of Malta and more recently at the University. Maybe his only sin, according to some people, has been his public stand in favour of Malta's membership of the European Union.

It was evident that for these persons accuracy of the data was less of an issue than getting this person out of his job. The end result is that our economy has lost an expert professional person who was willing, capable and fit for the job which he was doing. The least I would expect the NSO to do is to reappoint Gordon Cordina as its director.

These are two sad stories indeed. They are unconnected but have one underlying feature - our ability to discard capable, willing and fit human resources as if they were some disposable item. This is not right both from an individual point of view as well as from the point of view of society as a whole. The economy just cannot afford it.