A catchment area of a few thousand folk is not usually where reputable teaching hospitals tend to site themselves. Photo: Matthew MirabelliI was buttonholed by a gent at the place where I pass some of my time on a working day (no, not at Cafe’ Stretto, which is a place to take breaks) who told me that he enjoyed my assorted public utterances.
No accounting for taste, is there? If you look at the comments - especially on that portal where comments are unmoderated and where the comments seem to reflect the bile that spews forth from its main star - you get the impression that whatever I do that has a public profile is worthy of nothing less than personal opprobrium and invective.
So it’s nice when you get people like this, it gives you the energy to keep tilting at the windmills of the arrogant and smug.
This bloke, who prefaced his comment by saying he was not a man of erudition, made what seems to me to be an entirely valid point: in the process of bailing out the Cafe’ Premier good ol’boys, Premier Joseph Muscat’s government not only spent €4.2 million of our money but, by elbowing out the private sector offer in the same amount, forewent the possibility of receiving the couple of millions that were owed to Premier Muscat’s government by the Cafe’ Premier.
So, leaving aside the usual creative accounting practices resorted to by bean counters that make my teeth itch and brain hurt, from where I’m sitting the scandalous and tacky deal to which Premier Muscat gave his nihil obstat actually cost the public purse effectively way more than the already eye-watering four million and more that were involved.
And then they have the nerve to get offended and turn nasty because people call it a scandal and invite Premier Muscat to smell the rancid coffee.
I didn’t watch the debate between Simon Busuttil and Premier Muscat. The usual suspects classified it, from what I read in Times of Malta before tapping out these few words, as “more of the same” and people who watched it also made the same point.
Some of the ‘usual suspects’, erstwhile Premier Muscat groupies, seem, from their reported comments, to have become less infatuated with his brilliance and promise than they were heretofore. This confirms, to my mind, that when people describe Premier Muscat’s showing as “more of the same”, they mean that he is still promising the earth, the sun and the moon, along with lashings of pie in the sky and castles in the air, plenty of bling but not so much bang.
For instance, how are we to believe that a shiny new hospital will be up and running in Gozo within 12 months from the closing of the ‘expression of interest’ process at the end of this year? I am prepared to wager that this promise will meet the same fate as Premier Muscat and Minister “Shame On You” Konrad Mizzi’s shiny new power-station, which is not even anywhere near up and running as we speak (an understatement of cosmic proportions, that) weeks after the date by which resignations were promised if it wasn’t.
How come a (UK) national health hospital has money to spend outside its direct sphere of operations?
Premier Muscat’s breathless admirers aren’t about to admit they were wrong about him just yet, however, so his, and his government’s, performance (and the arrogance of it) didn’t attract the sledging it should have.
On the other hand, by attributing “more of the same” to Busuttil, I suspect the commentariat was - perhaps unconsciously - trying to play down the acknowledged fact that he is growing into his role, slowly but surely.
Starting from perhaps the worst place any PN leader ever had to start from, Busuttil has taken hold of the big stick that every leader needs to be able to wield and the results are starting to show.
He’s starting to annoy Premier Muscat and get under his skin, too, which is a sure sign that he’s doing his job well.
The big news that dominated the post-debate mediasphere, though, was Premier Muscat’s big announcement, the one by means of which we were told that Queens Mary Hospital, later clarified to include Barts and The London, would be setting up shop here and transforming our decrepit health service into Barcelona FC’s clinic. Just for starters, if you need proof beyond reasonable doubt that Premier Muscat consistently and as a fixed modus operandi stores up, like a chipmunk in his chubby cheeks, little morsels to be dribbled out (or, as in this case, expectorated with vim and vigour) when the great unwashed need to be distracted, bear in mind that this ‘news’ had already been broadcast many, many months ago by Godfrey Farrugia (remember him?).
So, nothing new there, actually, except for the questions that arise.
To start with, how come a (UK) national health hospital has money to spend outside its direct sphere of operations? Anyone who knows that politics is also practised outside our shores also knows that one of the main battlefields of the UK election campaign, currently in progress, is the NHS and its financial travails.
Just who, then, and precisely, is about to send quite a few millions, welcome as they are to us, our way? Surely this needs some light thrown on it, so we can smell the coffee. On their website, the Brits involved have put up quite a good bit of information but why do we always have to get enlightened from outside sources?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the very best being lavished on us in the medical field and, from personal experience, we already have a pretty good health service, pig-ignorant comments under the stories about Premier Muscat’s meddling with it notwithstanding, but I hope we’re not going to get collectively bamboozled into being lumbered with another sell-out to a bunch of dubious characters.
It does not seem to be the case but Premier Muscat’s past might be indicative of the future, on the strength of his record to date.
In the same vein, my eyebrows start doing this up-and-down thing when I see all the emphasis being put on how Gozo is going to get a state-of-the-art facility, with hordes of medical students and their families (yes, because medical students all live with their grandparents, parents, siblings and aunties and uncles when at Uni) injecting shed-loads of cash into the island.
Pray Hippocrates that this will be the case, especially given that, at my advancing age, I might very well need their services when in Gozo, but a catchment area of a few thousand folk is not usually where reputable teaching hospitals tend to site themselves, so what’s going on here?
More smoke and mirrors, maybe? On the other hand, maybe not, let’s hope.
Malta, including Gozo, deserves, and was in the process of getting, nothing but the best, aforesaid pig-ignorant comments notwithstanding, and the PN needs to be sure that it hounds Premier Muscat into giving us nothing but the best, even at the cost of being branded as negative and obstructive.
There is nothing negative and obstructive about taking the right position and asking the right questions because Premier Muscat’s first two years in government have made it crystal clear that when he does something, searching questions always, but always, need to be put and answered, both in the House of Representatives (where responses that evoke “Mhux fl-interess tal-poplu” [not in the people’s interest] are not acceptable, even if dressed up in a ‘commercially-sensitive information is not to be given’ disguise) and out of it.
If this attracts the insults with which Premier Muscat’s little friends pepper their pig-ignorant (yes, I know I’ve repeated that pejorative, it needs repetition) comments, then so be it, needs must and all that.
And so, just to irritate the lil’elves, a couple of recommendations for you, on the usual subject, the one characterised as close (and perhaps dangerous) to my heart.
Beppe’s in the Menqa was a place we hadn’t been to for too long and a visit last Saturday confirmed that it remains rewarding.
On our way up North for the long weekend, we had a truly excellent meal at the Commando Restaurant, in Mellieħa. Our (rowdy) table of nine was unanimous in its finding that this was somewhere we should not have neglected for so long since our last visit.
imbocca@gmail.com
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