The anti-divorce movement has not received any funding from the Nationalist Party for its campaign, its spokesman Arthur Galea Salamone said yesterday.
“As far as I know we haven’t been given one euro cent by the PN,” he said yesterday in answer to questions.
As to whether the Church had given any assistance, he said a parish had allowed the movement to use its premises in Paola for meetings but that was it “as far as I know”.
The movement had also visited a number of small “congregations”, which included Church groups, which had given the movement contributions. Other donations had been received via SMS.
The movement and the Curia have in the past both declined to say whether the Church has contributed any funds to the anti-divorce referendum campaign. A detailed account is expected to be released once the campaign is over.
Dr Galea Salamone was speaking after a press conference at which he said the Yes vote now enjoyed a small majority which had, however, shrunk from the 53 per cent at the beginning of the campaign. The movement has been conducting its own small polls to try and gauge public opinion.
He criticised the Yes movement for focusing on “half-truths” throughout the campaign which he called “worrying” since this was a “historic referendum”.
Giving examples, he said that although the referendum question itself implied that children would be looked after, 71 per cent of the Maltese believe the introduction of divorce would have a negative impact on children, according to a study carried out by the movement.
On another point, he said over a period of 11 years, an average of 11 couples per year obtained a divorce from abroad, amounting to some 0.5 per cent of all marriages. In the first part of this year, 404 people were married, 56 per cent of them in Church. But only 24 couples who were both Maltese married civilly.
The Yes movement also used the term responsibility when one could walk out on the relationship for no reason whatsoever, absolving people from any responsibility.
If divorce were introduced, people’s faith in marriage would decline and the incidence of cohabitation would increase, he claimed. In Ireland, cohabitation had gone up by 400 per cent in the 10 years after divorce was introduced.
The movement also criticised the Yes camp for trying to use Cana Movement founder Mgr Charles Vella to promote its campaign.
He said the No movement did not think divorce should be applied to civil marriages because these were not second class to religious ones.
The Cana movement yesterday pointed out in a statement that in the national census of 2005, 93 per cent of marriages were reported to be stable. Moreover, the NSO Lifestyle survey of 2007 found that 90 per cent of Maltese couples were happy in their relationship.
“We could say that the Cana Movement played more than a small part in this success,” it said.