Exactly what is the point of this?

Who’s Owen Bonnici trying to impress with his wreath – the unknown families of the unknown dead?

How inappropriate. People die in the most appalling way, and the state general hospital CEO (Ivan Falzon) thinks a brilliant response is to issue a public call for people to sell bunches of flowers to the hospital morgue where the 24 corpses are being held for a post-mortem.

Exactly what is the point? Are they going to stand the flowers in jugs around the morgue? Stick them in the freezer with the bodies?

By the time the burial comes round, the flowers will be dead.

Maybe he’s trying to fashion a Princess of Wales-style ‘outpouring of grief’, which set the trend over the last 18 years for people to leave flowers and teddy-bears and pagan notes to the dead at the scene of death.

Besides being pointless, it’s completely inappropriate, Mr Falzon. And it’s mawkish. ‘To the unidentified’ – really?

This sort of thing only works – and is appropriate only – when it is done as a symbolic gesture by society itself, as when wreaths were cast onto the water where many people drowned in a similar manner off Lampedusa, before the television cameras.