The wit and wisdom of Labour's Marisa Micallef: you can have a roof over your head and still be homeless
By the way, what happened to the new party emblem?
Instead of looking to the Labour Party for policies that have yet to be formulated, go to the party’s news website, Maltastar, and monitor the confusion emerging there.
The latest, uploaded today, is a crazy piece written by Labour’s EUR40,000-a-year ‘media guru’, now demoted to housing consultant and functionary, Marisa Micallef. It’s as cracked and silly as her last published piece, the ‘blurred prince in his fairytale kingdom’ letter in The Times.
After a seven-month gestation, she has now popped out this thesis: even if you have somewhere to live, you can still be homeless.
And please, will somebody tell her that something can only be roofless if it had a roof to start with, which is why a theatre designed to be open can never be roofless and nor can a human-being, because human-beings were never designed with roofs.
Marisa hasn’t had the guts to put a by-line to her nonsense – perhaps she’s ashamed of writing for Maltastar? – but I’d recognise that dreadful, clodhopping, convent-school third-former style anywhere, even without the bells on.
So here you are, on a sunny Tuesday afternoon: take a look at the Big Brains behind Labour’s housing policy, and see whether you can make out what this woman is trying to get at, because I can’t.
Social housing for ‘energetic businessmen’ who have separated from their wives but realise too late that they can’t run another home?
Here’s the Daphne solution, and for free: send them to live with Marisa. She’s been hunting for one of those ‘energetic businessmen’ for the last 13 years at least, with mixed results, and is now on the hunt again. But she’s not going to find what she wants at Labour HQ because they’re all too naff for her taste and Louis Grech is taken.
Homeless is not (just) roofless/Maltastar
Mention the ‘homeless problem’ once too often and you may be classified as a pseudo do-gooder in search of a poverty-platform to get yourself noticed.
Now you do not come across people sleeping it rough at night along Tower Road or cooking their beans on open fire under Manoel Bridge do you? So the homeless issue in Malta is surely a non-issue. Or is it?
Maltastar.com decided to knock on a few doors. Our experience was an eye-opener.
Stop thinking homeless in terms of just roofless, we were told in no uncertain terms.
Homeless is a battered wife with no income or clear perspective, who is unable to run away from her hell.
Homeless are her children who return to the house with a heavy heart and relentless trepidation.
Homeless is a husband drained of his self-respect, an unwanted ‘worm’ in his own house, not having the wherewithal to escape his nightmare.
Homeless is the youngster mired in a trap of drug-abuse and usury, whose parents o the verge of giving up on his basic needs.
Homeless is a person who has lived on her/his own for years, now suffering from a debilitating illness that condemns her/him to a lonely, awkward life within a once bright abode.
Homeless are those who have fallen for all sorts of marketing ploys having now to decide between paying the bills or buying food.
Homeless is an energetic businessman who separated from his wife, suddenly realizing that setting up a new home will stretch his resources to unprecedented limits.
The list is indeed endless.
All these real-life cases do not happen suddenly. They creep on victims gently and unsuspectingly.
Dealing with symptoms at an early stage (eg. a fracturing relationship before it actually shatters), or knowing where to turn to when a situation becomes unbearable, may go some way to limit traumatic fallout.
For Homelessness carries three spiky characteristics.
It is silent and invisible to the rest as the victim often suffers alone within murky confines.
This makes it easy for Governments to stick to the ‘homeless means roofless’ limitation to abdicate responsibilities.
Homelessness is at the cutting edge of poverty. Only hunger remains a final stage of absolute poverty.
Homelessness spares no one.
And so the final word goes to the European Commission, Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities:
Homelessness can be defined narrowly to include only people without a roof over their heads or it can be defined more broadly…
It has been argued that the continuing use of narrow definitions in many countries makes it impossible for those countries to develop programs and policies that acknowledge the range of different groups, the pathways and trajectories into and out of homelessness, and the need to foster independence (Greenhalgh et al, 2004).
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“energetic” – maybe this is why he wanted to get separated in the first place. Is the second home with an equally energetic 20-something from the Eastern bloc, who spends his money like there’s no tomorrow, by any chance?
Or with a 50-something twice-divorced woman, maybe?
It seems that although Marisa has a roof over her head at Centru Nazzjonali, she is still not “at home.”
Good one.
Someone like her will never be “at home” somewhere like that, no matter what sort of facade she may put on.
“Homeless is an energetic businessman who separated from his wife, suddenly realizing that setting up a new home will stretch his resources to unprecedented limits.”
Sounds like a ‘Marlene Business Forum style’ businessman not to have worked out the cost of his actions BEFORE he made his decision to separate.
LOL!
“When I get ready to talk to people, I spend two thirds of the time thinking about what they want to hear and one third thinking about what I want to say.”
— Abraham Lincoln
The last paragraph is taken word for word from the introduction of chapter three of this report. The quote should be within inverted commas and after 2004 there should be the page number.
You use (Greenhalgh et al, 2004) when you paraphrase.
Elementary Ms Micallef, imbasta bil-Masters u lanqas taf kif ghandek tikkwota.
http://ec.europa.eu/employment_social/social_inclusion/docs/2007/study_homelessness_en.pdf
Nahseb li t-tifel tieghi kapaci jaghmel composition ahjar minn din il-gradwata fin-nalh u li tiswa l-eluf ta’ liri tac-cwiec Laburisti.
Although the feature (or essay?) quoted above does not carry the name of the author, from the minimal use of the interrogation marks, it is clearly not written by the other “third former” who puts together the Leader (and the More Leader).
The ‘blurred prince in his fairytale kingdom’ letter in The Times was easier to understand. I avoid the words ‘made more sense’ deliberately.
mlatasart.com seems to have perfectly merged two literary styles: the moronic and the cryptic.
That is the longest banal definition of “homeless” that I have read in my long life. That is not “homelesness”. That is the definition of all the tribulations of life – many of them self imposed.
It is a BLURRED definition.
Marisa Micallef mistook the definition of ‘social cases’ for homelessness, which is quite pathetic considering the fact that she’s supposedly a housing consultant.
Maybe Marisa has set her eyes on becoming Minister for Social Policy AND Housing in a Labour government.
She has to be elected by The People first. That’s the difficult bit.
At first glance I thought it was a poor man’s rendition of the Sermon on the Mount.
The new party emblem is still being decided, some want the TORCA to stay, while others want a TORCH.Either way they’ll never see the light.
If they find it so hard to decide about their emblem, imagine if they ever come to govern these islands!
Marisa Micallef has really lost the plot and it is now clear that she has become a by-product of the Labour party.
It took her six months of research to tell us all that the homeless, more often than not, face other serious problems – BIG DEAL – we all knew that.
How about another attempt at suggesting viable solutions – my guess is she has none and neither does the Labour Party.
I bet that Marisa Micallef will be thrown out of the Centru Nazzjonali by July-August 2010.
@Charlie Bates:
Are you suggesting Marisa will be homeless and roofless by July-August 2010?
Other countries must look at this list of ‘homeless’ in Malta with quite a bit of envy! Hats off to the government if we have to stretch the meaning of ‘homeless’ to such an extent to find any.
I personally find the following sentence extremely offensive to say the least.
Social housing for ‘energetic businessmen’ who have separated from their wives but realise too late that they can’t run another home?
Not to mention the comments A woman from the south had to say on the matter
energetic” – maybe this is why he wanted to get separated in the first place. Is the second home with an equally energetic 20-something from the Eastern bloc, who spends his money like there’s no tomorrow, by any chance?
Why is it that people always assume that it is Husbands who separate from their wives and not the other way around?
I guess one needs to be cautious before stereotyping Separated Energetic Businessmen & Equally Separated Energetic Businesswomen for that matter!
Oh my goossssssh I am starting to sound like Emmy Bezzina :-) LOL
[Daphne – I noticed that too, which is why I singled out that particular sentence for comment. The Labour Party is extremely conservative and male-centric. Women have a role, and men have a role. Women are assessed on their looks, but men are not. Women in public life are compared to each other, on the basis that they are all women, rather than being compared to men working in the same field or, as is truly contemporary/progressive, not compared to anyone at all. Men leave home, but women are left. Women do not take decisions to start out on their own. Women do not have an income and must be supported by the husband who leaves. Successful and determined women who don’t succumb to the Labour stereotype of currying favour and batting eyelashes or flirting are ‘witches’ who exert power by false and extraordinary means because they do not appear to be using the widely accepted means of sexual promise. It goes on and on. Very tiresome, but exactly what one would expect from a working-class party. The working-class is the most conservative sector of society, with very fixed views about ‘men’ and ‘women’.]
I’m afraid the lady is on a very shaky ‘foundation’. Even the few Labour supporters who are literate must be cringeing. Abysmal thinking and writing. Grasping at straws? Sinking in the mire?
You couldn’t have said it any better.
Dear Separated Man from Sliema, I took my cue from the word “energetic” and the setting up of two homes meaning two wives. As a general rule, if the first wife was working he would maintain the children and the second wife would hopefully have a job and a home of her own. I did not mean to generalise or lump all separated men in one basket.
What a classic piece of crap.
Marisa should read her piece again but this time remove all the ‘self inflicted’ problems.
She will be left with very little to write about!
Imbaghad jghidu dan mhux blog nazzjonalist.
You sound like you’d be more at home on Maltastar, so why don’t you simply migrate there and spare yourself the agony?
Yakov Smirnoff – kieku kien blog Nazzjonalist Daphne ma’ jgibx il-hmerijiet li qed tghid inti hu hafna ohra tal-kulur tieghek!
Tibqax tixrob ha tigi f’sensik.
Yakov Smirnoff, ghandek ragun ta – dawn in-Nazzjonalisti kullimkien jiddeffsu. U holl xgharek u gib iz-zejt meta tasal l-elezzjoni generali jibdghu jfaqqsu minn kullimkien. Nispera li Angolino jsib il-bajd taghhom u jeqirdu din id-darba.
Dear Woman from the South, I fully agree with you that one cannot lump all separated men in one basket as much as I would neither lump all separated women into another. I thank you for your clarification. Have a nice evening.
What she must have meant is poverty (financial, mental and quality of life).
Yes, for the mental poverty we can make a monster of a nanny state, but for the rest I’m afraid Labour can’t do squat.
Marisa, I think you should reconsider the meaning of these words and use them to your benefit (or misuse them to your detriment as you have done in this article).
Homeless means what the word implies, “without a home”.
Homelessness means the “situation of being without a home” (maybe a better word to use in your article to describe the state of someone who you think is homeless).
Home means a place where one lives, like a house, flat or mud hut.
If somebody lives in a trailer-park, he is still not homeless and homeless is not a metaphor for poverty.
The article talks about social poverty, not homelessness.
oh my God what was the title of this article? The Beatitudes Revisited? I nearly cried.
But I do think that roofless means without a home. I actually believe she copied the idea, I read a very similar article also about roofless people being people without shelter in their lives. I cannot remember where I read it, maybe on the Guardian on line, or another English newspaper.
[Daphne -Impossible. For something to be roofless it must have once had a roof or been designed to have a roof. Human beings are not included in that. If ‘roof’ is used to denote shelter or the lack of it, it is used only in the expression ‘a roof over his/her/their head/s’.]
You sure made me laugh with the remark that she’s looking for an energetic businessman – although I believe that by now she’ll also settle for a less energetic type if he’ll have her.
[Daphne – Shame she can’t settle for Kurt Farrugia. He thinks he can do better than a functionary 20 years his senior. If he’s into the older chick scene – you know, like Robert Musumeci – he probably thinks Marlene Business Forum (same age as Marisa) is more ‘hajkless’.]
Roofless: Bla saqaf fuq rasu.
What a joke.
eeeeeeeee hekk ghidilha lil Marisa, li Marlene is more high class than her- this is as bad as comparing the magistrate to the back of a bus – very offensive indeed.
[Daphne – I know; that’s why I did it. I’m just enjoying the prospect of Marisa Micallef struggling to keep a zip on it and resist the urge to explain in explicit detail to the chavs with whom she has surrounded herself why she is superior in every way possible to Marlene Mizzi and becoming extremely frustrated when they just don’t get it, because to them, kless = money = designer labels. Very amusing.]
witch! (tongue in cheek, of course!) :)
Has anyone managed to read the whole article? I haven’t. As Genoveffa commented, it sounded like the Beatitudes. Do they expect the government to take care of everything? So progressive, I would say.
@Jim, no didn’t finish it either, it was too heartbreaking – kept sobbing and couldn’t see through the tears.
Look what happened to Shrek when they took his swamp.
Have a heart! For 40,000 euro a year she has to justify her existence.