Go and live in Pyongyang, Mr Sammut. You have that mentality.

There are so many garages one can look for.

You would flourish in a place like Germany, or Israel, where intelligence is recognised, put to optimal use and respected.

He did reply.

I’ll spell things out.

1. The death of her mother did not stop Mrs Muscat going on a freebie jaunt to the UN General Assembly in New York, therefore it should not stop us from debating this matter. Not that it should have, anyway.

2. As you correctly point out, Mr and Mrs Tanti entered Villa Messina two years ago. This means two things: (a) that €80,000 of public money have been spent to keep them there so far, and (b) that the prime minister abused his position to place his parents-in-law at Villa Messina on the government’s dime.

3. The private-public partnership scheme has operated for years as a way for the government to deal with emergency cases when it does not have room for them at the state care home, St Vincent de Paul. The PPP scheme does not mean that the private owners of the care home give the government free or discounted places which the government can then dispense to its supporters or cronies. It simply means that the government pays full whack for places which it then uses – or is supposed to use – for emergency cases like bed-blockers at the state general hospital. The private care homes do not give the government free or discounted places. They have no reason to do so because they can sell them outside the PPP scheme.

4. The morality of ‘putting’ your parents in a care home is not the issue here. The issue is that Mr and Mrs Tanti are/were in their mere 60s and regardless of how much care they needed, the Prime Minister and Mrs Muscat could have done what half of elderly Sliema does and engage carers to look after them at home. If you take a walk along the Sliema front on a summer’s night, you will see that it is chockfull of elderly people in wheelchairs or using sticks being walked by their carers from the Philippines. It is not as though the Muscats would have had trouble getting a work permit for a carer or that they don’t have the money to pay for them.

The fact that he did not reply may prove your point. You can never be 100% sure about anything.

Maltese men in general, across all social strata, are spoiled and leave women to do the dirty work and buoy them up. They have little initiative and dump things on others.

They are also extremely supercilious towards women, patronising, rude and have no idea how to have a normal conversation with a woman without leering or making suggestive remarks.

This is not just my experience, but the experience of most women I know.

Maltese men will only respect a woman if she makes it VERY clear to them that she is not to be trifled with. And then, rather than respect her, they are scared of her and try to undermine her in less obvious ways.

Whether this man’s sister is unemployed and has time on her hands or not is irrelevant. The way he spoke makes it VERY CLEAR that he thinks of it as her problem and not his.

The reason why women are routinely dumped with the problems of ageing parents in Malta, while their brothers do little or nothing, is because of the embedded attitude that anything ‘domestic’ (dependent children and later, dependent parents) is a “women’s issue” for women to deal with while men get on with their very important lives.