There was something uniquely symbolic about the first item on the 8 o’clock PBS news last Monday.

For those who spared themselves the aggravation by watching Paramount Comedy instead, the item in question was all about the ongoing migration from St Luke’s to Mater Dei Hospital. Not of the doctors, who have just been given their own private little Christmas present by Santa Gonz in person, and are too busy celebrating to actually go anywhere. Not of the nurses, either, nor the patients, nor even the machine that goes “beep”. These, it seems, will have to wait a while longer before being admitted to the Kingdom of Heavenly Healthcare.

No: the PBS news item on Monday was all about the migration from St Luke’s to Mater Dei of… the chapel crucifix.

I kid you not. For five whole minutes – an eternity, in TV reportage terms – we were treated to the spectacle of a truly bizarre Via Crucis, as the 400-year-old crucifix was painstakingly transported, all wrapped up in white linen, on the back of an open jeep. The scene reminded me of that classic shot from “Goodbye Lenin”, when a waving statue of Vladimir, suspended from a helicopter, drifts like a spectre through the streets of post-Perestroika Berlin. Surreal. So surreal, in fact, that I half expected junior minister Tonio Fenech to suddenly sprout out of nowhere, volunteering like Simon of Cyrene to carry the cross himself for the last station of the tortuous road to Mater Dei. But ah, how silly of me… he already did that last year, after Health Minister Louis Deguara collapsed under the weight of an unaccountable Lm300 million expense.

Now, had this been a news item on a station which valued quality reporting, there may well have been a sardonic comment on the unmistakable symbolic implications of the event. For instance, how Mater Dei Hospital – a project which has cost the exchequer nearly half a billion euros already, and which is more than likely to bankrupt the country’s entire national health service – has proved to be the cross we will all have to bear. At a stretch there may also have been a quip on the word “crucifixion”, which doubles up as a pleasing pun in Maltese: Mater Dei having metaphorically “crucified” us with debt.

But this was PBS, so there was nothing even remotely resembling sophistication about any aspect of its news presentation. Instead, we got a straight, square and utterly pointless blow-by-blow account of the 400-year history of the statue, an interview with the hospital chaplain, an in-depth analysis of the logistical difficulties posed by its transportation… all rounded off with a few chirpy words to the effect that – even if there are no doctors, nurses, patients or machines that go “beep” in a hospital which officially opened last June – visitors can at least pray to something real, instead of an empty space on the chapel wall.

Fantastic news, I must say. And there is much to pray for, too. For instance, we can all pray that today’s rain (it’s raining cats and MEPA consultants even as I write this article) will not flood the new hospital as past deluges have: damaging medical records, destroying stock-piles of precious medicines, and possibly even short-circuiting the machine that goes “beep”… if there were any machines there to short-circuit.

We can pray for all those expectant mothers in labour: in particular, that they don’t pop half-way through the eight-minute trolley ride from the ambulance bay to the maternity ward, resulting in placenta all over the corridor floor, among other inconveniences.

And above all we can pray to God that the negotiated agreement between Government and the Medical Association of Malta (I believe it’s called “Wham, bam, thank you MAM”) will truly stem the medical brain drain, so that the hospital’s future patients might even get themselves visited by a qualified medic, instead of relying on a magic shoelace or a 400-year-old crucifix for all their medical needs.

And this, of course, was the great, earth-shattering miracle of the week. Never mind the Via Crucis. It seems that after years of procrastination, government has finally given in to practically all MAM’s demands, bar none.

Right. I won’t go into the merits of the actual agreement (you can read all about it on page 8) but a little something does need to be said about its significance. The way I see it, MAM has been asking for a pay-rise ever since the woolly mammoth went extinct around 9,000 years ago. Theirs was not the only profession to consider itself woefully underpaid and unappreciated. Even as the champagne bottles were popped in private practices all over the country, teachers and university lecturers – you know, those evil academics who enjoy depriving all those poor students of their God-given right to park their cars wherever they like – were looking on aghast. What about them? What about their own union, UMASA, which has been begging for precisely that kind of agreement ever since the end of the Pliocene period, when Agatha Barbara was still Education Minister?

Even in the healthcare sector itself, there seem to be different weights and measures depending on your union of choice. Health assistants, carers and aid workers at hospitals such as St Vincent de Paule are unlikely to have been over-impressed by the deal struck by MAM. After all, they’ve been making the same demands for the past 1.5 million years, too.

But of course, the care workers’ interests are represented by a troglodyte union which is clearly still in its Cro-Magnon phase, so the chances are we will see another nauseating strike in the near future, with elderly patients unwashed, unfed, their bedding unchanged, and left shamelessly to wallow in their own faeces, urine and bedsores. No doubt the Health Ministry will respond to the crisis by accusing – justifiably – the General Workers' Union of exploiting the sick, the weak, the elderly and the infirm for their own political advantage… but as we all order our popcorn and settle down to enjoy the spectacle, it would be wise to remember the dynamics that led government to capitulate totally to one union, while stoically holding out against all the others.

It’s called “force majeur”, and it works roughly like this:

1) Spend two decades loudly grumbling that the country doesn’t have enough money to meet everybody’s demands. “Sorry folks, we’d really like to pay you more, but we’re just too damn busy spending Lm10 million on a block of flats in Brussels to find the extra cash for your wage increases. Try again next century…”

2) Spend roughly the same time warning darkly about how “unsustainable” the entire health service is, and how you can’t sleep at night because of the “alarming” rising cost of medicines.

3) Having made the point that there simply isn’t enough money to improve the doctors’ demands, and that “free health for all” is a luxury this country just can’t afford, go ahead and spend Lm 300 million you don’t actually have, on a brand new, state of the art hospital which we don’t really need.

4) Engineer things in such a way that this new, luxury hospital gets to be completed just ahead of a crucial (for you, anyway) election, and then rope in all the island’s actors, artists, fire-eaters, jugglers and clowns to turn Mater Dei into one, giant electioneering campaign stunt... thus unwittingly playing into the hands of the very union you’ve been fobbing off all these years.

5) Wake up one fine morning and say: hang on a second. Where did all the doctors go? You know, the ones who kept threatening to leave the country if we didn’t give them that pay-rise they’ve been after all these years? And more to the point… how the hell can we possibly open our new, Lm 300 million, state-of-the-art, election-winning hospital trump card, without any doctors to actually operate all those machines that go “beep”? Ho, ha, hum.

6) Pick up the phone to your junior finance minister – that’s right, the same one who picked up the cross after Louis Deguara dropped it – and say: “Tonio: remember that annoying little doctors’ union which keeps bugging us for a pay-rise? Fix up a meeting, will you?”

Anyway. I somehow suspect that the government may well be regretting its decision to milk Mater Dei for all the campaign publicity it was worth. Don’t you?

rvassallo@mediatoday.com.mt