Evarist Bartolo | Sunday, 15 February 2009

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The beatification of Eddie

Last Sunday we witnessed the start of the beatification process of Dr Fenech Adami, who turned 75 the day before. I don’t think he is a monster, but neither do I think he is a saint. The tribute paid to him concentrated on his beauty spots and left out his warts altogether.
A few years ago when he was still prime minister we met at the Naxxar football club, early in the morning, for a reception to celebrate the village feast. Bleary-eyed, he was there a few hours after flying into Malta from Portugal where he had gone to lobby for Malta’s bid to join the European Union. He told me that at seven o’clock a woman had rung and woken him up to ask him if he knew of a place where she could leave her poodle as she was going away on holiday.
I do not know if he found a place for her poodle, but he certainly knew how to take care of those who helped him take the Nationalist Party into power. He was obviously very single-minded and focussed when it came to winning power, holding on to it and regaining it given the opportunity. He projected himself as a person who operated from the moral high ground of politics, but had no compunction about deceiving the electorate in a final pre-electoral TV debate with Dr Alfred Sant, when he falsely accused him of keeping his son out of university.
His promises 32 years ago to completely eradicate corruption from politics and achieve national reconciliation sound very hollow now. While many supported his policy to join the European Union as a step towards getting local society closer to the open and liberal societies on the continent, he was pivotal in restoring the powerful hold of the Catholic Church in Maltese society. Ten years ago he promised to legalise the rights and obligations of co-habiting couples to attract pro-divorce voters, but once the election was over he promptly forgot this promise. He overstayed his political role by successfully manoeuvring to become president of Malta.

Nonsense to ban ‘Stitching’
This is what ‘The Guardian’ said on Monday 5 August 2002, the day after ‘Stitching’ was performed for the first time at the Edinburgh Festival: “… audiences known for their cast-iron stomachs have staged their first walkouts on grounds of taste.”
George Orwell said: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
When it comes to theatre productions, liberty means the right not to turn up for a play that you find offensive. It means the right to go to the theatre and leave it if you disapprove of the play. Banning a play goes against liberty and does not make sense in an open and democratic society.

Killing parliament
Until Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi was shipwrecked on the reefs of the opposition presented by the Labour Party and Flimkien ghall-Ambjent Ahjar, saving himself by withdrawing his support for the crazy project of having an underground museum dug out of the square in front of St John’s Co-Cathedral, the PN was saying that “the Opposition’s motion (calling on government to drop the project) is dangerous because it interferes with the EU process of allotting funds.”
Most of the funds of the project were going to come out of EU structural funds in the budget 2007-2013.
It is the PN’s way of doing things, ignoring parliament altogether in the way that EU funds are to be spent, that is totally out of step. The priorities on which government is spending EU funds have been mostly set by government and the PN has not had the decency to involve parliament in any meaningful way, as if only the PN government has joined the EU and not the whole country.
Addressing a conference in Lithuania on 29 January 2009, Mr Herbert Bosch, Chairman of the European Parliament’s Committee on Budgetary Control, said about the EU Accountability process: “In the Commission’s White Paper on European Governance, ‘accountability’ is regarded as one of the five principles of ‘good governance’, the other four being ‘openness’, ‘participation’, ‘effectiveness’ and ‘coherence’. The White Paper defines ‘accountability’ as follows: ‘Accountability. Roles in the legislative and executive processes need to be clearer. Each of the EU institutions must explain and take responsibility for what it does in Europe. But there is also a need for greater clarity and responsibility from Member States and all those involved in developing and implementing EU policy at whatever level’. It is in National Parliaments where decisions are taken, monitored and implemented not in individual ministries who cannot be held responsible.”
The EU Directorate General in charge of Regional Development has also been making the same point urging governments to adopt a “more strategic approach to programming though a focused national parliamentary process.”
Many other governments in the EU have subjected their plans on how to spend EU funds to parliamentary scrutiny to ensure that they are setting national priorities and involving the whole country in the decision making process. But the PN government sees our national parliament as a nuisance and a waste of time and wants to minimise its role in the country in all areas so that as much as possible it can do whatever it likes without being held to account.

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