Malta is in clover if our definition of a poor person is a failed businesswoman
I grew up in a Malta where people lived in slums, 10 to a room, where children never got washed, didn’t know what a toothbrush was and bore parasites, where generations had slept on straw on the ground so that when the new generation finally got a bed (and slept five to a mattress) they didn’t know how to lay it.
I grew up in a Malta where people routinely ate bread and little else, were stunted and undernourished, wore the same clothes until they fell apart, and where squalor and ignorance were so great that they were almost medieval.
Many people were literally little more than savages, and their children were treated like animals.
Girls married at 15. Children never went to school but ran about in the streets all day with no clampdown from the authorities. Reading and writing were considered luxuries and people were so ignorant that they thought a nasty little dwarf called Dom Mintoff was their saviour and trusted him so blindly that he did what he pleased and they thanked him for despising them and for turning Malta into Albania.
My father is from the parish of St Paul Shipwrecked in Valletta, and the feast on 10 February was a big part of my childhood. After the procession had gone past in a storm of shredded paper (our mother would keep us quiet in the holidays with a pair of scissors and a box of magazines, cutting up papers “for the feast”) all the children of the area would pour into St Paul’s Street to play and fight in the paper snowstorm.
Even when I was very young I remember being acutely aware that the children from the Arcipierku seemed to be from another country. They were markedly different and while they were children they were not like children. In Sliema, we played and fought in the streets every day, but this was another story.
That is the Malta I knew. And I am not talking about the Second World War, but about the 1970s, the Golden Years of Socialism. So you’ll forgive me if my definition of poverty is not a woman who stupidly used her home as security for a EUR127,000 loan to buy a restaurant lease from her uncle, because he was in financial trouble, without commissioning an auditor’s report on the business and above all, without reading the contract before she signed it.
And after the bank seized her home, she was given decent, new social housing and didn’t end up living in her car or in a shelter or even on the streets as she would have done in the United States of America, Britain, or any other true meritocracy, where losing is the flipside of winning, a principle that Joseph Muscat seems unable to understand, confusing as he does a “mettocracy” with a system of privileges for the undeserving.
The woman in the story beneath will be representing Malta in Brussels at a conference on poverty. I can imagine what the reaction will be: if this is the worst example of poverty that Malta can find, the place must be paradise.
And for God’s sake and their own, will The Times please stop reporting this rubbish unquestioningly, instead of showing it up for the rubbish it is.
A few days ago they interviewed, as an example of tragic Maltese poverty, a man in Valletta who stopped working two decades ago when he was 22, but went on to produce five children, the youngest of who is just two, who won’t even paint his mouldy walls or fix the broken windows in his requisitioned flat but covers them with rubbish bags and expects the authorities to sort them out for him.
I was relieved to see the string of comments beneath that story, telling him to get off his butt and earn some money, to clean his own house and paint his own walls, that he shouldn’t have had children when he had no intention of working.
Good, I thought, so I’m not the only one who thinks this is crazy, so people still prize self-reliance and despise bums. Like me, they don’t think this is poverty. They think it’s scrounging.
Now, this morning in The Times:
WHY POVERTY DOES NOT HAVE A FACE
Jane’s slow descent into poverty started at a family wedding, four years ago, when she offered to help her uncle out of his financial problems.
Trusting in the advice of her uncle and father, she used her home as a guarantee for a bank loan she and her sister took to buy the restaurant lease from her uncle.
This was meant to sort out his debt and kickstart a new catering business. But the plans went haywire.
Business complications tore her family apart until she was pushed out of the business – severing her ties with her father and sister.
The restaurant business crumbled and Jane, a separated mother of three, lost her home to the bank.
Jane will be one of three Maltese people sharing their experience of poverty during the 11th European meeting of people experiencing poverty organised by the EuropeanAnti-Poverty Network.
The meeting, to be held in Brussels this week, will bring together over 150 people from 30 countries with direct experience of poverty. The Maltese delegation is headed by Fr Saviour Grima, director of the Millennium chapel.
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http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20120507/local/why-poverty-does-not-have-a-face.418679
People lived in slums? 10 to a room? Who never washed? And girls married at 15? And children never going to school? And all this in the 70s?
Implying this is some form of “Mintoffian-socialist” lifestyle.
I notice that the PN narrative is distancing itself away with lightening speed from real life.
The next thing I suppose I will read here is that the Manderaggio in Valletta was built by Mintoff.
[Daphne – Yes, Albert, that’s exactly how it was. A girlfriend who is five years my junior, which means that she was still at school in the early 1980s, came to Malta as a child when her Maltese parents decided to return here from England, where she was born. They sent her to a state school and to this day she talks about the culture shock of encountering children who didn’t know what shampoo was, children who literally stank, who communicated and behaved as though they had never been exposed to civilisation (possibly because they hadn’t), who were completely alien. In this post, I’m speaking of my own direct experience, Albert, and not second-hand reportage. I forgot to mention something else: how most people in Malta, a tiny island, couldn’t swim because they never went to the beach and the idea of going to the beach for fun was weird and unheard of. They didn’t have cars to get them there, and they didn’t have swimsuits to wear. The beaches were largely empty, and when groups of lads from Malta’s non-coastal villages made a special expedition to the sea, they were hugely conspicuous. They wore cut-off jeans because they didn’t own trunks, and they didn’t know how to sit about and chat or sunbathe. They spent their time shouting and showing off and attracting as much attention as possible. And when families from the same non-coastal villages borrowed a car or whatever and made the same expedition, they came equipped with those great, big black inner tubes of truck-tyres and they all held onto them because they couldn’t swim. And they put up a ‘kamp’ and brought all kinds of things with them as though about to climb Mount Everest when everyone else just had a towel and a book. The same attitude is still apparent in the same families a generation on, except that now they bring even more things because they can afford them and you’ll never see a truck tyre’s inner tube because it’s now embarrassing.]
If I am not mistaken the rivalry between ta’ San Duminku and ta’ San Pawl in Valletta has the poor/rich divide as one of its dimensions.
[Daphne – As if. Both parishes encompassed large numbers of slum dwellers.]
Albert, no need to go back to the 70s. In the mid-nineties, as part of my summer placement work, I was asked to visit some families in Hamrun to encourage their children to attend summer camp.
The news story there was shocking.
I never knew what a slum was till I visited these families. I grew up having a room of my own and so did my other two siblings.
I couldn’t understand how five or more people can cook, eat, live and sleep in one room with no basic sanitary facilities, where the stench of fried food and cigarettes engulfed the room, where education was unheard of.
It was a shocking experience for me. And this was summer 1996.
Don’t embarass yourself in this way.
“I notice that the PN narrative is distancing itself away with lightening speed from real life.”
Mr. Farrugia, if you want us to believe that the things Daphne says are not true, it is you who are distancing yourself from real life. I remember well how life was in the 70’s and you can never convince me it was otherwise.
Albert, didn’t you know that the equivalent of shampoo and body wash was ‘is-sapuna tac-cavetta’ which was also used for washing clothes?
At the beach I went to – where these boys in cut-off jeans were hugely conspicuous – the same boys invariably carried a ghetto-blaster on their shoulders. They clearly had their priorities wrong, especially since hi-fi was hugely expensive in those days, and was thus not accessible to most.
Dear Daphne. I am sure you must be mixing dates. I stand to be corrected but I think that in the seventies you must have been a little toddler and what you state were your experiences were in fact what your elders might have told you.
[Daphne – No, Silvio, I was a toddler in the 1960s. You may have been in my father’s year at school, but he married at 22 and so his children are quite a bit older than yours are. I am quite clear about the situations I describe. I was a particularly observant child and an even more observant teenager.]
Yes of course there was a lot of poverty then. It was the same all over Europe If I had to recount the poverty I met in Italy, you would thank God that you were living in Malta.
Believe it or not, there were still soup kitchens in Italy, and I don’t mean Sicily but Rome and Milan.
I will not go into who got us out of that poverty. Whoever it was, we all owe them gratitude.
Believe it or not, going to the beach with a huge aeroplane tyre was something we all looked forward to, and I can assure you they were the best times of our life.
Judging by the huge amount of food, maccaroni, fried rabbits etc. that the then poor used to take to the beach would make you miss those days, when now we have to content ourselves with a hamburger.
The important thing is that we will never go back to those times, and if you think this is impossible, just look at Greece, which is on the way there.
I’m sorry I missjudged your age,but it was you who missguided me.
How did I know that as a teenager you were still cutting strips of paper for the Festa.
Of course those were different days and it was only us Sliema boys who were the naughty ones.
But joking apart, we have to admit that even though we lacked a lot of things, they were happy days.
[Daphne – OK, Silvio, I’ll spell it out. I was born in late 1964. I was a toddler until 1966. I was a child in the early and mid-1970s and a teenager from late 1977 to late 1984. I trust all is clear now.]
You missed one:
and since the nineties, the best and my favourite journalist on this island.
I mean it.
What about the hobz biz-zejt u gbejniet tal-bzar and poor old mum shouting her lungs out, warning her little ones not to venture too far out to sea.
Not to mention the mizbla left behind, because that’s the way they were brought up in those dark Labour days.
Ghax ma nbidel xejn.
There wasn’t much of a ‘mizbla’ (tip) in those days, because we did not have that many consumables.
Most of the rubbish was biodegradable paper, and there was not much plastic around.
I remember my mother feeding us corned beef, with raw onion, tomatoes and bread.
The Church has a lot to answer for. Why keep on encouraging people in the belief that they are victims of circumstance, rather than of their own ignorance or gullibility?
The world is full of sharks, but that doesn’t mean the sharks are always to blame.
The Church? Why not blame he government instead. It is responsible for subsidizing our “welfare state”?
Anyway, if we’re going to point fingers at the mentality fostered by the Church (according to you) in the collective psyche, may I remind you of “Ghin ruhek biex Alla jghinek”
How would that square with your world view?
The Catholic Church in Malta does not foster a mentality of self-reliance. Deliberately or unintentionally, it fosters a dependency mentality.
I really don’t want to drag this, but you are completely misinterpreting a “doctrinal” point.
The Church can never encourage people to lean on others for the simple reason that we are responsible for our actions on every level. It does exhort us to be charitable, however.
Islam, on the other hand, mentions the “maktub” – which implies a sort of “helplessness” in the face of “destiny”. This is one of those things that we’ve inherited from our Arab rulers, so I don’t blame you for getting them a bit mixed up.
They should be traveling to a symposium of the naive, gullible and inept. Such people deserve to be gobbled up by sharks.
“she wants to be able to find a job”.
So this has been going on for four years and she still hasn’t found a job.
What was she living off before to justify getting such a big loan in the first place?
This poverty excuse is getting out of hand. Just because someone says he/she can’t make ends meet, it does not necessarily mean, they can’t make ends meet. It could mean, they don’t want to make ends meet, or do not know how to make ends meet.
Poverty…what poverty?
I’m more than sure these people get some form of relief from the state.
I was appalled last time I needed to wait for our parish priest. The queue of people I found waiting for him, was beyond belief. When I asked what they were waiting for, one woman said: ‘we’re here waiting to receive the monthly consignment of food provided by the European Union’. European what? I said. Yes, once we’re certified by our family doctor and parish priest, as living below the poverty line, we automatically are entitled to the provision of food sent over.
What kind of food entitlement?
‘Depends. This time they seem to be distributing, four packets of raw rice, a large packet of biscuits, sugar, jam, etc.’
What do you do with all that rice?
‘All sorts of different meals, but at least we eat decently,’ said another woman. Ok so what do you do with the rice?, I asked.
The woman said: ‘we cook bolognese rice, fried rice, rice with butter, baked rice. Its good. At least we don’t have to buy it.’
Poverty?
Oh yes, nice excuse. But, surely, people are not dying of hunger here.
I was born in the fifties. I remember a few beggars in the streets, some war-damaged appartments , children playing in the streets with the “rota”, and lack of electrical appliances and commodities that we all take for granted nowadays.
The sixties were a boom for Malta in more ways then one.
I confess that the picture you present of life in Malta at the time is completely alien to me , though it fits perfectly life in Malta eighty or ninety years ago,as related to me by my late father when I was young.
I agree with you 100% and I am in my 60s.
The kind of poverty described by the author was only relegated to me in stories by my grandfather of what common folk life was like in the early 1900s.
I did not come from a rich family but I had all the amenities of a middle class family and had what they had in a comfortable home. My father was a tradesman in the dockyard and I did go to the sea swimming and had plenty of good food and a very nice modern bed in my own room.
Now I am not saying all of Malta had this good and I do remember getting my first shock regarding poverty in Malta when I was very young and had I accompanied my dad with a truck and driver who was helping a just retired spinster great aunt move from a rented room in a Birgu tenement.
This room was used temporarily when she was working at Bighi hospital and when she sometimes had a falling out with her sister and so we where there move to her belongings back to her nice large house main home which she co-owned and shared with her married sister.
I do remember some of the doors of the apartments in this building were open and I could see the sparse furnishings and some did have straw on the floor for bedding.
Although the building was fairly clean and the people seemed nice enough but very simple and not the entitled mentality mob of the later decades lower classes.
[Daphne – My goodness, how unobservant you all must have been, or sheltered, or unable to work things out. You saw straw on the floor for bedding in one tenement building and assumed that the practice was confined to that building because you never saw it anywhere else? Have you also forgotten how many prostitutes there were, how many children in orphanages, in the 1970s? There was poverty even among my contemporaries at school, a convent school: girls who had never tasted butter because their mothers bought margarine instead to save a penny or whatever. And they’d bring their sandwiches to school folded in the paper wrapper of a Golden Harvest loaf (or whatever brand it happened to be), then fold it carefully away to reuse it again and again until another loaf was used up and they had another wrapper. They had no toys, no books and pocket money was an alien concept. Everything was deemed ‘hala ta’ flus’ and so they lived lives pared down to the absolute minimum. How quickly we forget. ]
No, Daphne, I did not see all that you mention for the simple reason that I emigrated away from Malta with my family, all because my father could not stand the Labourite hatred and their shenanigans and favoritism based on political party lines and their caveman mentality, plus their union co-opting at the Dockyard during the 1950s.
And Dom is still alive – nasty bastards do live for ever unfortunately.
Not to blow my own horn but these 1950s tat-torca fuggers drove a lot of decent maltese families away from their beloved homeland and Malta got a salty concentration of spiteful and lazy ne’er do wells that showed their meanness in the 1970s and 1980s.
I am glad that I left the island at such a young age, at an innocent age that I did not know what a prostitute was.
Burning down the police stations in ’58 was a foreshadow of things to come. They even ruined Malta’s national day in ’59.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/51841741@N07/7162324536/in/photostream
We used to get a lot of beggars knocking on our door in the sixties.
Boiled puppy-meat was an occasional staple in the diet of some poor old people in Malta up to the 1950s.
And even later on not all the trapped sparrows “tat-trabok” ended up in a tiny cages as a lot went into pots.
I often wondered how many sparrows one has got to eat to feel satiated.
[Daphne – And snails.]
Yes, people routinely slept on hay some decades ago. Many of those (and others) went about barefoot.
And when children were lucky enough to have shoes, their mothers cut off the toes when they became too small, so that they could use them a little while longer.
Brava! Really well said! I agree 100%. This is not poverty. This is lack of risk management.
“Many people were literally little more than savages”. This statement describes the present Maltese society quite well. The only difference is that the present day savages own large cars.
So what has really changed since the 1970s? What difference has the PN made to society except that the level of illiteracy has increased?
[Daphne – How old are you, Farrugia? Young enough to imagine that it was always like this, I suppose, and too slow and unmotivated to discover otherwise.]
Personally I feel sorry for this woman, and the other man that was mentioned in this blog.
After reading “Keep the aspidistra flying” I understand that poverty is not just a financial situation but also a state of mind. Suddenly the world seems difficult to penetrate because you have no money.
Having no money means you cannot go out to meet up with friends because you can’t afford to get to whichever place they are meeting and can’t buy a round of drinks, or get a plate of food.
This means that you end up isolating yourself, and this isolation brings about depression.
I believe that depression is a real condition and can have very negative effects on a person’s life. Just think about this woman who had no family on her side even though her initial motives were to help a family member.
Although, had she been in the USA or the UK, her story would have been much worse.
When I hear them talking about poverty I really laugh, because these days, if you want to earn some money on the side you can.
I know quite a few people that they make a good income, four days a week cleaning people houses. They are paid very well.
If you have no education at all and you have a couple of houses, you can help yourself by doing this.
I don’t believe that in this time of age in Malta there are a big percent of the population starving. I think we have mismanagement how to handle the money we have. Yesterday Puttinu gathered over 900.000 euro, plus about two weeks ago another sum was collected on Xarabank.
We were a family of six. My father died at 35 and we never lived the way you mentioned above, because my mother was a very smart woman. She opened a grocer’s shop, and did very well. We all went to school, and three of us went to a church school. I’m talking about the early 1960s.
In 1954 , the year my father died, there were no social services like they have today. We owned our own home, which meant that we were not entitled to any help.
Nowadays people are very spoilt, and they know every detail about how to get these benefits. They don’t want to work above board, but have their income undeclared and collect every cent the state gives.
I don’t feel sorry for people like this. If they want the money and they don’t want to live in the poverty they are talking about, I tell them: get up on your feet and get a job. My mum did it in the 1950s, and so can you. It’s much easier for a woman now.
A nun who works among familiies with social problems once told me that most people who live in poverty end up like that because they have no idea what priorities are.
If a housewife has a stack of bills to be paid and she has seen an ornament for the house that she liked, the priority is the ornament.
Unbelievable…… Is it possible that no one realises such? Or is it considered as some sort of EU-funded freebie to Brussels?
Malta is forced to import more poverty by accepting illegal immigrants. More arrived last night.
It is what the Jesuits want.
All the politicos are Jesuit trained and nicely brainwashed.
[Daphne – I’m not sure I agree with you that it comes from the Jesuits. I think it comes from the home, and the fact that the majority of St Aloysius boys came from a certain kind of background/home. My husband was at that school and couldn’t be more different. I knew several boys (men, now) who went there, from ‘Sliema’ homes (not necessarily from Sliema; it’s just a cipher) who Franco would probably think of as St Edward’s types. Schools had an influence, yes, but the real influence came from the home.]
Odd that these top politicians all over the world are Jesuit-educated and are the biggest turncoats to their own nation’s interest.
Malta is choc a bloc with these coadjutors and so is the EU hierarchy.
They are all on the same page with ruinous policies that they all blindly agree to. The Jesuits were not kicked out of 60 nations throughout their history for nothing. Meddling is a fine and crafty art with these snakes.
[Daphne – I don’t share your opinion about Jesuits. At all. The problem lies, and I said this earlier today in response to another comment, with the sort of parents who choose to send their sons to Jesuit schools. Not all of them, of course, as this is just a generalisation, but if you study the social background of boys who went to St Aloysius College, you’ll notice that it tended to be ambitious lower middle class and working class, with very few exceptions. Sixth form college was another matter. When St Edward’s opened its doors in the 1920s, it hoovered up the sons of the so-called upper middle classes. My grandfathers’ generation went to St Aloysius and to the school run by the English Jesuits, St Ignatius. Their sons went to St Edward’s, except for my father, who went to the Lyceum because my grandfather, largely due to his experience as a boarder at St Aloysius, objected to any sort of school, most particularly boarding school, on principle, believing it to have been invented for the express purpose of making children suffer. St Edward’s then allowed boys home only to celebrate Christmas and Easter and for a short time in the summer. They weren’t even allowed home on the weekend. The generation after that also went to St Edward’s, but the following generation went to San Anton School – taf int, bhal ta’ Joseph u Michelle.]
Remember, the old dictionary definition of the word Jesuit was ‘a clever person who deceives the people’.
At their higher level this military order has more power than you imagine Daphne, not all Jesuits are 4th vow, yet most are very intelligent men, as they accept no other. They were banned from Malta in 1768 and supposedly disbanded by the pope in 1773 after many complaints by various kings and nation leaders for their meddling and interference.
Most Jesuits ended up in Corsica where their newly minted avenger arose. Napoleon did payback service to any group or nation that slighted or previously kicked out the order, hence why Napy invaded Malta in 1798 and made the SMOM find a new home.
They were fully reinstated by the RC church in 1814 at Napoleon’s insistence and had full control of the church by the time of Pius IX infallibility proclamation in matters of faith in 1870.
Jesuits started to come back to Malta in the 1840s as educators to get their foot back in the door. These heirs to the Knights Templar where favoured by the upper middle classes and by some in the curia like Bishop Annetto Casolani and opposed by Bishop Pace Forno and the Dominicans.
They have a hand in all the political parties and are expert puppet masters in the oppo-same Punch’n Judy game of politics The Labour Party is in much of their hand as the so called Nationalists are.
As Joe Pesci said in JFK, “Its all fun and games man”.
The title should have been ‘Why stupidity does not have a face’
Still, the woman in this story is a poor person. She could have been a gambler , drug addict or an alcoholic.
Mintoff used to say “L-ikbar bicca xoghol hi meta trid taghlem lill-injurant”.
The ignorant will never learn and believe it or not certain situations are still the same.
My friend is a needlework teacher in a state school (where stupid subjects like this one are still being taught). She is disgusted by certain students because they stink.
Was it Mintoff who wanted to demolish the Mandragg and the residents where against this project?
Kellhu ragun jighd Mintoff li-akbar bicca xoghol hi li taghllem lil injurant ghax jekk ma taghlmux tkun tista tirrenja fuq l-INJURANZA li ghadna inbatu minna sallum.
Il-knisja ukoll qatt ma kellha nteress taghllem lill-injurant.
Il-PN dejjem kellu ghal qalbu l-isvilupp ta’ Malta u sar hafna progress bis-sahha tal-PN fil-gvern imma jekk certu nies jahilfu li ma jridux jinbidlu u jimxu skond iz-zmien, ma tantx hemm x’taghmel.
Instead of sending Jane to the European Anti- Poverty Network they should send her to a more appropriate place, like a lunatic asylum.
Jane has many options available – she may be slightly distracted by what happened to her rather than thinking on what she should do next.
She qualifies to receive help from the state, she can work as a cleaning lady, she won’t die of hunger because food to the helpless is provided by the European Union, the new housing scheme for a one-bedroomed flat sounds very reasonable (even for a two-bedroomed flat), and if she plays her cards right, I bet you all, she’ll have leftover money to reduce debt and save for a rainy day.
Maybe Jane should speak to the “Konsulent tal-Housing.” When Labour is in government, this sort of poverty will be totally eradicated, because Labour is safe for business.
Le he, dak ‘save for business’ kien qal. Haha!
Edgar I agree 100% with you. It seems that her MALTA of the 70s was not the same MALTA where I spent my youth. I remember overcrowded beaches from Bahar ic-Caghaq to Mellieha Bay. As if nowadays persons leaving the beach do not leave a mizbla when they leave.
[Daphne – Who is ‘her’, Joseph – the cat’s mother or the person who suffers you to comment? You are completely wrong. Beaches were largely empty from Sliema to Mellieha, and what’s more, I have the photographs to prove it (because we tal-pepe had cameras).]
Good morning Daphne while writing in a hurry, by her I meant the lady who was supposed to be living in Malta. By the way I come from a poor hardworking family and we also had a Kodak box camera with which my family have lot of old photos amongst which while having fun at the beach. My mother was a first class swimmer.
It could be that your photos show different sites of another Malta, maybe like the story of St Paul’s shipwreck, many foreigners claim that it was not Malta which I live in.
[Daphne – You don’t say where your mother grew up, Joseph, though quite frankly you can say anything when you’re anonymous and who’s to dispute it. This isn’t a matter of social snobbery, but a pure statement of fact from which there is no politically correct escape. All people from a certain kind of background could swim, because they tended to live on the coast, and if they did not, then they had proper summer houses in coastal villages. People from another kind of background, who lived away from the sea, never had the opportunity to learn how to swim and regarded trips to the beach as special occasions. This habit and attitude dies hard, and they still see it as a special trip, despite going routinely and having the car to get there. Hence all the packing, tents, chairs, food and preparation. People who grew up near the sea take only a towel, a book and a bottle of water (or none at all, because they buy one there). These are matters of anthropological interest, and you shouldn’t get so het up about it.]
A scene I can never forget was of a lady in an enormous black rubber ring, tied to the shore as she could not swim, and fully clothed in a dress not a swim-suit.
After years I learned that those black monsters were the inner tubes of truck tyres.
Daphne you are sinking fast. Get a reality check. Why are we still hearing and reading about poverty in Malta in 2012, that is after 25 years of Nationalist governments?
[Daphne – Because as a much better man than you once famously said, the poor will be with us always. But the reality is that we’re pretty good on the poverty front, largely because most European poverty is caused through loss of family networks and jobs, and there’s very little of that here. There will always be poor people mainly because there will always be people who have rotten judgement, are lazy and take bad decisions, the woman here being a prime example of that. And as for the man interviewed by The Times, who decided at 22 that he wouldn’t work again but still went on to father five children….Sure, I’d be poor too if I took a stupid loan on my house and lost it, then went to the casino and gambled everything else away. But that isn’t the kind of poverty we mean when we say “poor”, is it. That’s bankrupt, which is different in tone and meaning. The woman featured here isn’t poor, but technically bankrupt. There’s a difference. Even if the result is similar, the causes are not, and that’s what counts. Governments work to eradicate the causes of poverty rather than poverty itself, but they do not work to stop people from bankrupting themselves. That’s not the concern of the state, and as a liberal (I assume, given that you’re so keen on Joseph), you will appreciate the fundamental freedom of every individual to behave in a way that will make him bankrupt, without state interference.]
Daphne, you are right. I come from a working-class semi-literate family in Zabbar and when I was a young boy in the Sixties and Seventies my father used to take his horses and sheep to bathe in Marsaskala and St Thomas Bay before shearing.
He took the wool to Gozo to have it woven into blankets. We had a horse-drawn carriage and used to travel to the seaside.
Marsaskala and St Thomas Bay were deserted, unlike nowadays.
[Daphne – Yes, I have photographs taken at Ghajn Tuffieha (what people now call Golden Bay) in the early 1970s. We children are in the foreground, and stretching behind us in the background is nothing but sand empty of people.]