Hey, my dog wants some social assistance, too

Published: November 2, 2008 at 12:05pm

The government has announced a scheme that will help people get onto what the English-speaking world calls the property ladder, except that in Malta this ladder has just one or two rungs. You move in, and you stay there until they take you out in your coffin, except that maybe you’ll buy a bigger maisonette sometime.

Working on the principle that the word ‘everyone’ might be misinterpreted in some quarters as meaning ‘not everyone’, the government has specified that this scheme is open to ‘single or separated persons, single parents, married or unmarried couples, and couples with children’. If you belong in some other category, please send me a postcard.

You can choose a house or flat priced at up to €120,000 and the state will pay up to 30 per cent of your monthly loan repayments for 10 years, without asking for its money back. Of course, there wasn’t a chorus of approval on the internet from the usual suspects asking where their free light-bulbs are and congratulating Muscat for addressing the nation on Super One, when only heads of state and prime ministers do that, and on the state broadcasting network, not the party wind-up parrot aviary. There was silence. And then one man chirruped beneath the on-line news report on the scheme, complaining that there’s nothing in it for “middle class earners who aspire for properties in excess of €120,000, because you don’t get anything decent in a decent area below that amount.”

I paused for breath, knowing what was coming next even if I hadn’t scanned the lines already: “Basically, I’m out of the question together with other young professionals out there! Can’t the ceiling be raised to €185,000?”

How far we’ve come in 21 years: from a bunch of imgewhin to whining that the state should part-fund the €185,000 homes of the aspirational middle-classes. The new definition of social services as the whiners would have it: state hand-outs to young professionals Lucy and Mark to help them pay for a nice house in a good area so that they don’t have to live somewhere they don’t think befits their station in life with Carmen in rollers next door, and so they don’t have to pay for it all themselves and my god, like, work.

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Spring was a pleasure this year because the garden was full of birds and birdsong. It was like living in an aviary. The highlight was the golden orioles which took up temporary residence in the mulberry tree and kept me glued to the window, listening to their call and waiting for that flash of brilliant yellow. It was such a strange experience, having lots of birds other than the usual sparrows around the house after living here for almost 20 years.

But this autumn is a nightmare. I wake up to the sound of guns. There is shooting even on weekend afternoons, when there shouldn’t be. The other day I looked out of the window to see a flock of white and black birds flying low across the valley, and suddenly it was like being caught in a the crossfire between rival gangs of Mexicans in some third-rate Western. You can’t see the men; you can only hear their guns. The birds, flying together, panicked and scattered. Some flew lower, some flew higher. Some went to the left and some to the right, and some fell to the ground. It was galling, and what is worse is the feeling of helplessness, standing there watching and being unable to do anything about it.

I can write about it later, but there is enough anger already at these destructive individuals who think they have a God-given right to ruin everyone else’s pleasure while destroying as many birds as possible along the way. Autumn brings as many birds flying over Malta and stopping for a rest as spring does. But whereas last spring – the first time that shooting was banned – our garden was full of birds, this autumn there are none, only the sparrows which stay close to the house.

People who live in urban areas will have no idea of the very real difference that a ban on shooting makes in terms of the presence of birds, because they can’t see it and hear it on a daily basis like those of us who live in areas of open fields. The difference is shocking. It backs up the suspicion that many of us have had for years, which is that despite the protestations of bird-shooters, who claim that there would be few birds anyway, the only reason we haven’t got any is because of them. When they’re banned from pursuing their ‘sport’, the birds stick around.

I am really tired of hearing bird-shooters argue that this is tradition and we should stick to it, that they have a right to their namur. There is no moral difference between shooting flocks of birds out of the sky and destroying trees in the forestry project near Mellieha, which is why some shooters think nothing of doing the latter in revenge for what they see as their persecution. We have no more moral right to shoot birds out of the sky than we have to set about destroying trees growing in public spaces. But try explaining this to the shooters, who operate on the principle that what belongs to no one belongs to everyone, or more specifically, to them.

December is fast approaching, and with it, the usual corpses of shot robins in our garden. Almost every year I write about this, and every year it is the same. Other people know it is Christmas because they see robins on cards. I know it is Christmas when I see the first blood-spattered tiny robin beneath the laundry-line. Why shoot a robin? You tell me, because I am mystified. They’re so tiny I don’t even know how they spot them.

My home-help, who feels about bird-shooting as I do, came marching in a couple of days ago still angry about a conversation she’d overheard at her local shop. A man walked in and told the shopkeeper that he’d shot a ‘big white bird’ – he didn’t know what it was called, but still he shot it – and then went into paroxysms of ecstasy describing how his shots had reduced the creature to a mass of blood and feathers (“gibtha raghad”). He was practically salivating, she said. It’s all about the killing, isn’t it? There’s something so unsavoury about the motivation behind all this, but the shooters try hard to dress it up as sport and tradition. It’s a shame really, because many shooters are just ordinary decent people in the rest of their lives, and then they behave like this and upset us all.

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BirdLife is about to conduct an information campaign over two years, telling us about bird-trapping and how it will be banned by the end of this year. The bird protection lobby will spend €350,000 and has secured half that amount from the European Commission. It seems to me that the timing is not quite right. The campaign should have preceded the end of bird-trapping by at least a year, telling us why it would be banned, and then another year afterwards telling us how good the ban is. But a two-year campaign about bird-trapping which starts when bird-trapping is finally banned? I don’t know about that, but that’s just my professional side talking. My ‘ordinary citizen’ side says ‘Go for it’, though it would have been much better to concentrate the entire sum in a single year, lambaste people, and then forget about it.

BirdLife is going to explain to those who don’t know it already why the ban on trapping is crucial for biodiversity in Europe. Strange as it may seem, lots of people are unable to understand that these are not ‘our’ birds nor ‘nobody’s’ birds, but the birds which live elsewhere in winter and summer, and which are part of Europe’s common heritage. We are killing the birds which the people of other countries treasure, the birds which we admire when we travel and say: “How lucky they are to have so many birds.”

Trapping birds is illegal across the European Union, but Malta had negotiated a transitional period which is up on 31 December. This will give us respite from those men with their nets and their decoys and their Riservato and Praivit signs. But it won’t give us any respite from the men with their guns.




4 Comments Comment

  1. Antimony says:

    Do the RTO signs actually mean riservato? I was under the impression that they are an abbreviation of ‘Reserved To Owner’.

    [Daphne – RTO is a truncation of ‘riservato’. If anything, it would be Reserved For Owner and not To, and in that case, the sign would read ‘No trespassers’ and not ‘reserved for owner’.]

  2. Zizzu says:

    Most people today – and I don’t have only young people in mind – are what I call Vodafone people or, the “Life is now” Brigade.

    Many people seem to think that it is a God-given right to own stuff on a whim with little or no thought directed at how they are going to pay for it – or whether they can even afford it. I know that this boils down to the unsavoury topic of money, BUT it’s what makes the world go round and it’s the new measuring stick. Nowadays you are what you have.

    The comment you picked on is a perfect illustration. Why should anyone even think that they “should” be living in a house worth at least €185K? If you work and you can’t afford it you’ll have to accept the fact sooner rather than later. If you work and you can afford it good luck to you, but it doesn’t mean that just because X has it you have to have one like it. It says volumes about our level of education and capacity for analytical thought.

    I know people who buy “flashy” cars just to be seen in them. In private they are constantly complaining that they can’t keep up with the house loan (another bombastic affair) and the car loan (I can’t imagine why anyone should take out a 2nd loan with a huge chunk of the first one still to be paid).

    This brings me back to the “Life is now” Brigade. Such behaviour tells me that the people who indulge in it have a very tenuous link with reality. If my boss drives an expensive-looking car (I’m not into cars, really and I can’t mention a flashy car if my life depended on it) why should I expect that I can own one too?

    I know that I am veering dangerously close to supporting class distinction, but who says that we are all “equal”? We are equivalent, but we are not equal, and the sooner some people see this the better.

  3. Vanessa-clair Farrugia says:

    Zizzu, I beg to differ. With a good salary one can do lots of things that our parents would only dream about. But, being a salary it is finite. I know too many young and not so young people, who fritter most of their salary, without saving enough, and piling credit card debts on top of it all. If people save more, and spend less on ‘luxuries’ they will have more squirreled away for the down payment on their dream house. But, if they want to “Live it now”, pay later, then they have to accept that life is either branded clothes, new cars, exotic travel and expensive entertainment tastes or their dream house, one thing has to give. There is nothing wrong with wanting to live life in the present and wanting everything to be the best, but one can’t have everything in life, and most people don’t accept this. What do I do? Well, I have a mortgage, I do go out, buy fashionable clothes, but I moderate all my expenditure, and yes, I do count pennies. Only by counting pennies can I make sure that my (good) salary serves me the whole month through.

  4. Jean Paul Fiott says:

    If you want to have a good albeit sad laugh and understand better what kind of people these ‘hunters’ and ‘trappers’ are just read their comments about Ms Caruana Galizia on their forum.

    http://forum.huntinginmalta.org.mt//YaBB.pl?num=1225643842

    [Daphne – For 20 years I have provided hours of fun entertainment to every saddo and sicko with a grudge in this country. The internet has given rise to all kinds of Let’s Diss and Bitch About Daphne special-interest groups. I just wonder why I seem to generate obsession. I guess it’s the absence of any real celebrities in Malta, so they have to make do with a newspaper columnist. Oh well. Maybe I should start wearing tight black leather and a whip, to really give them a thrill.]

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