Harry Vassallo | Wednesday, 11 March 2009

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The flutter of butterfly wings anywhere on the globe may be the initial cause of a hurricane thousands of miles away, or so chaos theory goes.
In a tragicomic chain of events, some overenthusiastic partisans of the Beland band club of Zejtun acted as the blasphemous butterflies giving rise to a chain of events leading to the sacking of Ing. Patrick Attard from his job with the Malta Resources Authority. It may remain forever impossible to trace the connection from end to end with every crackpot detail of its zany trajectory; but connection there certainly is.
The story starts some 18 years ago when the Beland band last participated in the Easter Sunday procession of the Risen Christ, and this for reasons which apparently continue to satisfy the band’s partisans to this day. I know that much, and I am not minded to know more. It was also alleged that it was upon the insistence of Archpriest Eric Overend, that the same band participate in this year’s procession; and this in turn was the raison d’etre for the participation of some of the wackier of the band’s partisans in the Nadur Carnival last weekend: which, of course, makes perfect sense to the butterflies amongst us.
Taking their parochial feud far out of context, they seemed unable to appreciate that nobody else would be able to make head or tail of what they were up to. Why dress up as the Risen Christ in a Carnival? How is that funny, other than funny-weird?
The Zwieten were speaking in their arcane local dialect, but making noises which seemed intelligible to everybody else in common parlance. It was blasphemy. Wasn’t it? They had in mind to ridicule religion. It was clear to everyone. Or at least to the police who prosecuted them and the Magistrate who meted out punishment. It crossed nobody’s mind that they were acting out the latest episode in their feud with their Archpriest.
The imperceptible flutter rose in magnitude as the Bishop of Gozo expressed his dismay at this fall from grace, condemning the display within earshot of a journalist and having his fulminations reported in the newspapers.
Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, such momentous media events travel around the globe at the speed of light to arrive at the workstations and play stations of millions, if millions were moved to know of such things. More than this, anybody anywhere in the world could react to the news in a comment on the newspaper’s website.
Patrick Attard did. It must have seemed like something perfectly normal for him to do. Checking out world and local events while at work should be part of any professional’s daily routine. He ran into Bishop Grech’s outrage on the Nadur Carnival debacle.
Now Patrick, having earned the distinction of being Malta’s first gay and out-of-the-closet politician (since his resignation from AD, ex-politician) and having added to his notoriety by resigning from the Catholic Church in reaction to the Pope’s Christmas condemnation of homosexuality, must have done more than hum and haw in reaction to Bishop Grech’s comment. Gay rights activists tend to have their teeth set on edge by the gay-averse Catholic Church at every occasion.
He must have been struck by the incongruity of the Bishop’s comment on the Zejtun-inspired nonsense in Nadur, when there has been an awkward silence on far more serious matters. That was his comment. The mention of Nadur must have recalled the issue of the destruction of a fine a stretch of garigue and the underlying water resources to create an outsize cemetery for the village and its neighbours. He contrasted the Bishop’s ominous silence on that issue with his readiness to condemn the carnivalesque.
The cost to the MRA of his momentary distraction is probably unquantifiable because it is so miniscule, yet from the moment he pressed the send button, he set in motion yet another fatal chain of events. Someone somewhere noticed what he had written and complained to his masters. Within 135 minutes, he was sacked. The butterfly-wing process remains unbroken through this passage, but utterly obscure. We may never find out who in the hallowed halls of government knee-jerked so abysmally.
Attard was dumbfounded when told that he was being sacked for violation of professional secrecy. He had no idea that the MRA was in anyway involved with the Nadur Cemetery issue, and certainly he knew no secrets to violate on the matter. His comments were based on what he knew from newspapers.
As the enormity of the reaction sank in, the minister responsible for Resources and Rural Affairs, George Pullicino, felt the need to distance himself from the messy business in an official press release. Another press release, this time from the MRA, insists that the authority had not been pressured by the minister to effect the sacking, but did it all on its own.
The reason for the sacking was also transformed into misuse of the MRA’s equipment. It sounded like pressure had been brought to bear in the opposite direction to make doubly sure that no unsavoury whiff was attached to the Ministry.
The Beland band club, the Zejtun Archpriest, the Nadur Carnival revellers, the Bishop of Gozo, the operators of the Times website, Patrick Attard, Minister George Pullicino and Carmel Ellul, the MRA CEO, are all caught up in a fatal flurry of over-reaction leading to absurd tragedy. The revellers have been prosecuted and chastised, and Attard has suffered a significant loss of earnings in the process.
Would it not be nice to hear that somebody has taken it upon himself or herself to intervene, to introduce some sanity in this gaga samba and to reverse some of its effects?
Some of us would enjoy the comfort of knowing that people in authority are capable of acting rationally, and not always with the fractal automatism of natural phenomena.

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