Last week a series of anniversary celebrations came to an end. Their genesis can be traced back to the story of a young man, Lewis Farrugia, who in 1919 enrolled for a course at the Engineering and Architecture Faculty, graduated cum laude, attended postgraduate studies in Milan, commissioned into the Royal Engineers and then - the darnedest thing.
In 1925 he and his elder brothers hot-footed it to Ancona, purchased a virtually new brewing plant - and midwifed what was to become a household name. Eighty years ago to the week, the first bottles of Farsons Pale Ale were on sale on the feast of San Gorg - when else?
Simonds, beer importers, were swift to recognise the competition. Simonds-Farsons-Cisk, the result of a successful merger negotiated in 1929 by Farrugia with Simonds and, in 1948, with Marquis Scicluna (Cisk), was born. Two years later, the construction of one of the most aesthetically handsome breweries in Europe marked a fresh start for the group. Farrugia died soon after, in 1956.
In 1980, his son Louis, a young man of 28, launched the company on a dynamic and visionary course. He introduced the concept of human resources development before most people in Malta had even heard the term and embarked on an ongoing investment programme that uncannily prepared the company for the challenges presented by Malta's entry into the European Union.
Two months ago, the inauguration by the President Malta and the blessing of the Logistics Centre and the Soft Drinks Packaging Hall by the Archbishop, was celebrated in grand style, another landmark in the group's achievements. Bryan Gera, who has been the group's energetic chairman for a number of years, described the project as "part of a Master Plan, the brainchild of Louis Farrugia", the group's CEO, whose "leadership, drive, single-mindedness and ability" to see the projects through with the group's management team, made the brewery "one of the most advanced in the Mediterranean".
Louis Farrugia understood well that to stand still was to go back. Upgrading skills, plant and equipment, dynamic management and vision were the prerequisites for the Group's success. Considerable extensions were made to the original brewery, huge investments in modern plant and equipment. Work on a new 'brewhouse' will start in 2009 with 2011 as the completion date.
Today, Farsons are partners with Carlsberg, have a strong business relationship with Pepsico, package Anheuser Busch's famous Budweiser brand, are signed up with Britvic UK to produce their mixer range, sell Kinnie in Australia, Austria, Germany and Italy. This beverage and Cisk beer have not only withstood the competition from internationally recognised brands. They are themselves gaining international recognition.
Present for the launch of the centre and the packaging hall were several representatives from the US, Italy, Nigeria and Russia, buying, or about to buy, these products. Jeff Coleman, the owner of Distinguished Brands of Denver, Colorado, has started to import Cisk and Farsons Shandy, which is also available in Australia and Italy, whence that first brewing plant was purchased in Ancona.
Little wonder Louis Farrugia spoke with such understandable emotion at that launch. He paid generous tribute to his father, to the Marquis Scicluna, to his cousin Nini Miceli Farrugia, board, management and staff - in particular those who made such a creative contribution to setting up the logistics unit and packaging hall. But even his self-effacing approach could not hide the magnitude of his own considerable contribution to the company his father had created...
Pssst! Wanna make money?
During the Council of Europe debate on the decriminalisation of abortion, the Austrian socialist Gisella Wurm insisted that to deny a woman the right to abort was to use a form of violence against women. Her right to decide "(was) a matter of a woman's dignity". To ban abortion meant "traumatised women and health risks".
If pseudo-intellectual chicanery is what you are after, take time off to visit Strasbourg. For what is more deficient than to moan about 'a form of violence' and ignore actual violence on the unborn, to talk of traumatised women and dispense with the fatally traumatised unborn, to whimper about woman's dignity and argue for the elimination of a defenceless, human life?
We are witnessing perverse encounters of the Wurm kind in Malta, too, with references to the adoption of enlightened thinking on the subjects of abortion, divorce, gay marriage - else how uncivilised can we be? The sound of a report offering women 'the conditions of a free and enlightened choice' finds its little sir echoes here. Some who should know better, far better, throw the Enlightenment at us when it is obvious that Europe is in its a post-Enlightenment phase is strolling blindly towards the precipice.
Having got the Mistra nonsense so appallingly wrong, Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando's remark in Strabsourg that "a society which destroys its young condemns itself to oblivion" was surely on target.
This attempt by the Council of Europe to bully members into acquiescence should be treated with contempt. How symptomatic of the ethical abyss in which the Council resides that a subject calling for legalised evil should have its discussion time limited to three minutes per speaker. Europe, the creator of modern civilisation, is being hijacked by those who would destroy it, the Wurms and the Freudis of this world
For it is not only the moral and ethical teaching of the Church that are being jettisoned by the madness that has overtaken the CoE and the European ideal. We are going further back beyond Christ in our callous disregard for those He looked upon as the first in the kingdom of heaven, and dismissing a pre-Christian civilisation, too. This should come as no surprise. If the words Christian and God stuck in the minds of those who drafted the Constitution of Europe, sorry the Reform Treaty that is the Constitution of Europe, why should we think that they would allow Hippocrates to inform their non-ethical minds?
Four, five centuries before Christ, he fashioned his oath. 'I will use my power to help the sick to the best of my ability... I will not give a fatal dose to anyone who asks for it... Neither will I assist a woman in the means to abortion... if I keep to this Oath and do not violate it, may I flourish... if I should fail to adhere to (it) may my fortunes be otherwise.' Ah, Hippocrates. Ah, hypocrites. Ah, the trillion dollar abortion industry. They flourish, Hippocrates. They flourish.
The Pope and (some of) the media
On the same day, that a Daily Telegraph correspondent offered this banality to its readers - "The Pope offered prayers at Ground Zero, but other visiting Europeans wanting to show solidarity with New York will be expected to do the more conventional things and not leave without two pairs of designer jeans and an iPod," - The Washington Post was doing its best to surpass that pedestrian contribution.
Reading the Post can be an unsettling experience. Take this curious opinion. "Conversion and religious freedom remain major, thorny issues in the relationship between the Vatican and Muslim countries. Some Muslim countries prohibit Muslims from converting and punishments can include the death penalty, a position that Catholics find anathema' (sic). And how, pray, does The Washington Post find the concept of the death penalty being inflicted on a Muslim who converts to the Catholic faith, or to Christianity?
Not wishing to be outdone, a Reverend Patrick Ryan, an Islamic studies specialist (sic) remarked in the same edition: "That speech at Regensburg never would have happened if it had been vetted". Clearly not a Benedict studies specialist else he would have considered the possibility, as many scholars have since done, that "that speech at Regensburg" placed a mirror before Islam and dared its leaders to observe the contradictory reflections.
More boldly, it asked them to see how inter-religious dialogue between the two faiths could help to inject a deeper dialogue within Islam to seek a more profound understanding of the link between faith and reason, belief in God and a distancing of violence from that belief.
And how are we to react to the blessed New York Times, which expressed the crass opinion, some 20 years ago, that Pope John Paul II's visit to Poland in 1979 "does not threaten the political order of the (Polish) nation or of Eastern Europe". Last week, this premier opinion former in the United States added this irrelevancy to its archives, specifically, that Pope Benedict won the respect of the Americans but Pope John Paul remained their first love. How mentally pre-teens can you get?