A statesman for all seasons

At an audience I had with President Ċensu Tabone, I happened to address him as President of the Republic. With his customary smile, he gently directed me to refer to him as “President of Malta”.

There was much more than formal protocol behind his choice; there was his genuine determination to become the President of all the Maltese and Gozitans.

Dr Tabone’s appointment came at a very delicate moment of our post-independence history. He became head of state on April 4, 1989 and was, of course, the first head of state to hail from the ranks of the Nationalist Party.

The birth of the Office of the President on December 13, 1974 was not an easy one by any standards. The constitutional amendments necessary to change Malta from a monarchy to a republic took place during a very deep institutional crisis involving the very supremacy of the Constitution. These constitutional issues could not be referred to the Constitutional Court because Dom Mintoff’s government had already suspended our highest court by three years.

The Nationalist Party had to face the added complication of being internally split on the constitutional amendments. All these tensions were reflected during the dramatic parliamentary debate that preceded the introduction of the republic.

Dr Tabone’s oratory stood out and was sustained by a very proficient constitutional and legal analysis of the supremacy of the Constitution couched in legal technical terms, which would have made proud any lawyer present in the House. He, together with three future Presidents of Malta, Ugo Mifsud Bonnici, Guido de Marco and Eddie Fenech Adami, took hold of the majority of the Nationalist parliamentary group to ensure that the supremacy of the Constitution of Malta be saved through the entrenchment of the supremacy clause by a two-thirds majority of the House of Representatives.

It was therefore a poignant gesture by the House to appoint as President the senior most member of that formidable political foursome that had forged the modern Republican Constitution out of the ashes of the Independence Constitution.

Dr Tabone’s decision to be addressed as President of Malta was therefore a symbolic attempt to heal the profound divisions that had accompanied the republic’s birth. Yet, he was more than proud of presiding over a republican state. In his inaugural address of April 4, 1989, he specifically made reference to the Constitution “li emendajna flimkien ... meta flimkien waqqafna r-Repubblika fl-1974” (which we together changed when together we set up the republic in 1974).

Dr Tabone was a man of many talents and arguably was the last of the great amateur politicians. He entered the House at a ripe and mature age when he had already achieved enough in his personal and professional life to satisfy not one lifetime but multiple ones.

All the newspapers are paying tribute to his qualities of a very talented polymath amateur, in that he became an expert in whatever he came to love outside of the already prestigious achievements of his medical career. Famous remains his immediate prowess in matters technological even when in retirement.

Among these “amateur” talents are included the first-class service he gave to the state as an MP, minister and, finally, head of state. Once more, he excelled and dedicated his talented mind to the state and the Maltese and Gozitan nation he loved as a true patriot, above any partisan and personal gain.

Dr Tabone therefore may serve as an example to so many of our very young and talented politicians who enter politics so very early in life practically on a full-time basis before they would have made their groundbreaking experiences in humanity which their professional activities and married life, including parenthood, would expose them to.

Making of politics a profession at a very young age often turns our politicians into one-minded political machines. However, Dr Tabone was never like that. He brought into politics the warmth of a mature personality that had already experienced the joys of a big family and which, undoubtedly, proved enrichment to his latter-life political commitment.

I was moved reading the experience related by former Prime Minister Alfred Sant of the distress expressed by his young daughter at the news that Ċensu Tabone was no longer President of Malta.

Undoubtedly, of all of the heartfelt speeches of appreciation made by the members of the House in praise of Dr Tabone’s presidency, none can possibly surpass the genuineness of the very young and who instinctively always go to the very heart of any matter before them.