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There is just one very important link between PN secretary-general Joe Saliba and Pietà Local Council secretary John O’Dea, and that is the compass and the arc, the allegorical stonemason’s symbols used by freemasons.
Today, the former freemason John O’Dea has been appointed secretary of the Nationalist Party’s commission to analyse the party’s electoral loss at the 2004 European Parliament elections, in which Labour garnered a three-seat majority against the PN’s two seats. The PN statute bars any freemason from holding a position in the party. The appointment of the members on the Commission had taken place without the prior knowledge of members on the PN’s executive.
John O’Dea is a former member of the Irish Abercorn and Leinster Lodges, John O’Dea told MaltaToday his past as a freemason 25 years ago is public knowledge and that he only spent little more than a year and a half before leaving.
Asked whether he encountered any problems from the PN due to his past as a freemason, O’Dea said the subject had never cropped up before: “I don’t know why I was chosen, but since I am the longest-serving local council secretary, I was appointed secretary because of my experience in co-ordinating this type of work,” O’Dea said.
Joe Saliba did not answer to questions by MaltaToday on his choice for secretary of the PN commission.
In January 1991, the PN executive committee issued a resolution that refuted freemasonry after a series of articles appearing in the Labour organ Il-Helsien had linked several public officials with freemasonry, amongst them a magistrate, depicted as the ‘worshipful master’ of Villa Blye, the meeting place for the Leinster Irish Constitution lodge.
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