The Maltese living abroad

On July 21 the executive committee of the Friends of Australia Association (FOAA) had an informal but useful meeting at Dar l-Emigrant with two stalwart leaders of the Maltese-Australian community down under. Lino C. Vella and Lawrence Dimech have been in Australia for over 50 years but they can never forget their roots. They keep coming over to Malta in a regular manner but this was the first time we got together seriously and thrashed out a few salient points in connection with Maltese-Australian relations.

We discussed a number of important and mutual subjects and also recalled the Convention of Leaders of Associations of Maltese Abroad and of Maltese Origin which took place between January 25 and February 1, 2000. This was an initiative which confirmed the strong links retained by the Maltese living overseas. Both sides agreed that it is about time that some more of the recommendations made at the end of that well-organised Convention should be put into practice. I took it upon myself to start the ball rolling and deal with a few of the proposed recommendations which could help the many thousands of Maltese living abroad to interact more profitably.

Before me I have the voluminous book entitled Proceedings and Report published by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It is a detailed record of all the proceedings and the papers presented at the Convention and all the deliberations taken by the various delegates. On Page 496 we find the Recommendations adopted by the Convention, most of which seemed to have remained on paper. But for this time I want to concentrate on only one of these recommendations. It says that the Department of Foreign Affairs should be responsible for organising a conference in Malta for the Maltese living abroad on a four-yearly basis.

Six years have passed since then and this has remained on paper, just wishful thinking by the leaders and representatives of the various Maltese communities abroad. As the then Minister of Foreign Affairs, Joe Borg, wrote in the foreword, "the Convention paved the way for maintaining and intensifying such links in the future". But what has prevented another conference being held in 2004? We do need to involve ourselves even more profitably in a continuous exchange with our brothers and sisters overseas.

My committee hopes that the current Minister of Foreign Affairs, Michael Frendo, will once again get together with the Emigrants' Commission, form a new committee and start working on another of these all-important conferences, maybe not on as big a scale as the one of 2000 which included a lot of activities, among which there were exhibitions, a Pontifical Mass and a soirée.