Friday morning. The transport strike is over and, hopefully, life will get back to normal. We can now bury our dead and get from place to place without being blocked for hours in the hot sun. Valletta will be fully accessible again and we can get on with our lives; but at what horrendous cost?
The events of the past week have embarrassed and shamed us as a nation. The unacceptable behaviour of the strikers, the violence, the excessive testosterone and machismo have cost the country untold sums not only in euros but in prestige and reputation. It took fully 24 hours for the strike to be called off after the hearse owners, the cause of the original grievance, capitulated; another full day of hardship not only for many whose lifeline is public transport but for all the peripheral businesses that depend on it, starting from tourism.
On the positive side we had roads that were not clogged and jammed and we had no belching fumes either. Five days free of the "might is right" style of driving that has become a way of life. Once the fuel-pump strike was declared to be a false rumour, those who could still afford to get about in their own cars had a field day, but that's neither here nor there. The strike has shown the very ugly side of some of those whose job it is to provide a service on which people depend.
The more the price of fuel escalates, the higher will become the proportion of us who depend on public transport.
The photographs themselves speak volumes. We will not forget the assault on the crescented doors of the Auberge de Castille in a hurry; it looked as if 100 wannabe sumo wrestlers were on the rampage and I cannot but praise the police for having stood their ground before what appeared to be a herd of charging buffalo.
Incidents like these put paid to any positive public opinion going the way of the strikers. It took them five full days to realise that, apart from their own immediate family and possibly their friends, nobody, but nobody in their right mind had one iota of sympathy for them.
The Transport Federation had every right to strike. That is entrenched in our labour laws. However, and here lies the crunch, had it set up an emergency service and had the strikers been orderly and civilised, public opinion would have supported them. The initial cause, the hearse debacle, was solved with the hearse-owners' capitulation on Wednesday night and, yet, the union members decided to prolong the mayhem, I wonder why! It could not even be a political issue either.
Joseph Muscat made it quite clear that the liberalisation process must be carried out come what may. They had absolutely no support from anyone.
We always breathe a sigh of relief when anyone writes to this paper praising the good behaviour of a bus or taxi driver.
We may have become accustomed to the manner in which some bus and taxi drivers treat their passengers and behave, but last week's images of overweight "transport operators" in shorts and singlets was the last straw. One only had to read the blogs on this newspaper's website and the letters that poured in to realise that there was not an iota of sympathy for the strikers and, even had their cause been just, the way they went about it would have negated it anyway.
Minister Austin Gatt, intrepid as always, performed a mini-Maggie Thatcher and held his ground; an easy task, you might say, with public opinion fully on his side, but it takes guts to be faced with such mayhem, it takes nerves of steel to declare that he had a good night's sleep when serenaded by baying strikers at night. No, Sir, that was not funny. Let's hope that the days of being strong with the weak and weak with the strong are over.
Will public transport forever remain the inherent prerequisite of operators that include the thugs we saw in action last week? Will we eternally remain subjected to hostile growling, verbal abuse and goodness knows what else should we have the temerity to board a bus without the right change? Can we sustain the bad name that Malta is given as, for years and systematically, tourist after tourist is overcharged by white taxis? No, we cannot.
It is now, at the negotiating table - which, I hope, is a stout one that the real work begins.
There are, I am convinced, many within the rank and file of the public chauffeuring class who are decent individuals who I am sure are as mortified and embarrassed as we are by the shocking goings-on last week.
It is the duty of the ADT and the Transport Federation to take the opportunity of separating the wheat from the chaff once and for all and give Malta the reliable, comfortable and courteous public transport service it deserves.