Funny how it was only Marthese Portelli who was excoriated for fossil-hunting with her children

Michael Briguglio went fossil-hunting with his children round about the same time, and like Opposition spokesman Marthese Portelli, he posted about it on Facebook – which is how she got ‘caught’ with an ensuing fuss in the media.

Briguglio is no longer a party politician, but he remains a committed environmentalist and if we were going to subject anyone to hysterical criticism at all, he should have been targeted along with Portelli.

But I don’t think anyone should have been excoriated for fossil-hunting with their children, quite frankly. Fossil-hunting with children means taking them out to look for fossils and having them pretend to chip away at a couple. The reality is that children that size can’t actually fossil-hunt because you need to be able to use a proper hammer and chisel for that, and no parent in their right mind would allow children that small to use them, not for the sake of the fossils but for their sake. You can easily knock a finger off.

You know what? I think Michael Briguglio should have done the decent thing, been a gentleman and weighed in to defend Marthese Portelli – “Look, I did it too and none of you said anything.”

Briguglio’s Facebook post serves another, important purpose – it highlights the hypocrisy of those Labour politicians who criticised Mrs Portelli for taking her children to ‘fossil-hunt’, when they themselves are about to sign away the fossils at Zonqor Point to Hani Hasan Naji Al Salah to be crushed by his construction equipment to make way for useless rich kids from the Middle East, like his son with his red BMW and camel in the desert.