I think it’s different if we’re talking about improving health services. One has to be in the thick of things to know what needs to be done – a lawyer would certainly be less suited for the job.

[Daphne – Rubbish. You don’t engage a doctor to manage a hospital, FP. In any case, the best managers and people to run things are engineers or chemists. And we never seem to have any of those standing for election, do we. Can’t say I’m surprised.]

The health sector needs a good manager knowledgeable in the field, not a law maker. I would care less about someone capable of delivering a good bitching in parliament, and more about someone who truly knows what the sector needs.

Then again, neither are the many lawyer-ministers we have, or the psychiatrists concerned about dog poo.

I agree with Mrs Caruana Galizia. Either you are good as a surgeon or not. If not, you should be dumped.

Then there’s Chris Fearne, also a Labour Party candidate and a paediatric surgeon. Mr. Fearne performed surgery on a boy some years ago and in the UK it was considered as a huge success as it seemed that even the British surgeons couldn’t handle this case. Someone like him will be wasted in politics.

I can visualise a Hail Mercieca page on which the collective call would be “Look at him go, sacrificing precious time with his family and a lucrative profession for the good of the country!”

[Daphne – Not in my case, no. I tend to be suspicious of surgeons etc who want to do something else like go into politics. I can’t help thinking that they’ve realised too late they’ve missed their calling, and I’m kind of unhappy with the idea of a surgeon or architect who doesn’t really want to be a surgeon or architect but wants to be a politician instead. So be a politician instead, but don’t imagine you can do both. Those who tried ended up messing up one or the other. Law is different. Law and politics go together because both involve arguing and bitching about laws.]

Nah! Is it THAT obvious?

I appreciate all that, and I too would rather have Mercieca stay out of politics for the same reasons you speak of, reasons that apply to all professionals going into politics and not just Mercieca.

On the other hand, no arguments put forward here or anywhere else are going to make him change his mind.

But my point is that being Gozitan or not does not come into it.

How exactly does being an MP make you less competent in your profession?

So you’d rather not have professionals representing Gozitans in parliament just because they hail from Gozo. How’s that for a good line of reasoning?

[Daphne – Obviously, their professional competence is bound to suffer, FP. Not in terms of their actual operating or diagnostic skills, but certainly due to time and pressure constraints.One or the other is going to suffer. The reasons why parliament is empty most of the time and MPs tend to see their constituents when an election is approaching and never in between is precisely because they are trying to do too much. Usually it is is their parliamentary work which suffers. But quite frankly, I can’t see how a surgeon can spend half the day operating at the general hospital, half the day seeing private clients, three evenings a week in parliament, see constituents, go out on the hustings, campaign for votes and spend time with his nearest and dearest. It doesn’t add up and Franco Mercieca will not be the first one for whom it didn’t. If he really had the good of the country at heart, he’d dedicate his spare time to working extra hours on knocking down that waiting-list for catharact operations. And if he is made health minister, which appears to be the aim here, the general hospital loses an ophthalmic surgeon. I hardly think that Mercieca will be serving the country better as health minister than as an ophthalmic surgeon. But so few people actually do go into politics to serve.]

Not at all, Daphne.

But he’ll definitely make a better MP than the one he’s meant to replace.

[Daphne – OK, FP, you like Franco Mercieca. We get it.]

The very same people whose cause he’s championing.

I only hope that he’s genuinely concerned and not simply out on a vote fishing trip. I guess I’ll have my answer soon enough.

Has it become that easy to find a job that once you log with the ETC website you are given that job?