[Daphne – I think we’ve already been through this elsewhere on the blog. With Reuben Scicluna, I believe. Inexistent is used only in some strains of American English, and hardly at all. Most Americans use the proper word: nonexistent. ‘Inexistent’ was fed into Maltese English by a few people writing for the newspapers. I don’t wish to mention names, but one of them was Mona Farrugia, who used it all the time, and a couple of others are on the staff at The Times. I suppose they got it directly from ‘inezistenti’. Idiomatic English uses nonexistent. I don’t want to be a pedant about it or anything, but I think it’s a real shame when these little errors (which give away so much) go uncorrected and are repeated and repeated, when fixing them is simple and makes a massive difference.]

What are you saying?

Who is it that you don’t want anywhere near your door?

The next government?

To say that you’re being overly simplistic would be a gross understatement.

Similarly, it is not the Roman Catholic Church’s fault that children were abused, but the fault of some of its members. Did the Church have anything to do with the economic situation Malta was passing through? No, it didn’t.

‘The families got rid of them’ – Wrong again. The families were told that they would be relocating their children to have a better future. The parents trusted the representatives of the Church to do the right thing and protect the children. The parents didn’t get rid of them!

Pity you weren’t around at the time to tell them where Australia was.

[Daphne – Yes, I agree with you that the parents were cheated and tricked into parting with their children. In many of the most horrible cases in England, children were shipped out from orphanages, where they were billetted away from bomb-target cities, after World War II, without their parents’ consent or even knowledge. The children were told that their parents had died in the war, and the parents were told the same thing about their children. When the scandal was broken by, I think, The Sunday Times in London just a few years ago, the stories it reported were incredibly heartbreaking. It wasn’t just the Roman Catholic Church, certainly not where Britain was concerned. ]

Finally, following your attempt to annihilate logical and critical thinking processes, kindly explain how following the doctrine (sic!) of having more children produced, as a final result, abused children in Australia.

[Daphne – Compilation of evidence is not a word. It is three words. ‘Inexistent’ does not exist. The word you want is nonexistent.]

pre-trial – doesn’t exist here, as don’t the notions of discovery etc – this is a common law concept.

criminal inquiry – that is the word you are seeking for and is the word carried in our laws.

[Daphne – Criminal inquiry is not a word, but two words. Legislation does not carry words. It uses them. In English, the adjective ‘criminal’, if it precedes the noun ‘inquiry’, would describe the noun, i.e. the inquiry is criminal. There is clearly something wrong here. Perhaps the law was translated by the ‘body of evidence’ people, or the those who gave, in the white paper on rent laws, grandchildren as ‘nephews and nieces’.]

Reasoning reminds me of sleepy geometry lessons at college.QED: Quod erat demonstrandum!