Old man sleeps outdoors on hard ground while government pays for PM’s father-in-law to stay in expensive private care home

State social services, funded by the public purse, are meant primarily to help people like Joe Attard, who are completely without alternatives for shelter and survival.

Mr Attard, who is in his 60s, sleeps outdoors even in the coldest days of winter, when night-time temperatures hovered around zero degrees.

He doesn’t even have a roll-up mattress or a quilt. He lies down in his clothes on the hard ground. For the last few weeks he had been sleeping in the sheltered doorway to a house, until its owner called in the press to draw attention to his plight. A place has now been found for him at the YMCA.

The state provides places in old people’s homes for men like Joe Attard, and operates a system under which, if there are no places in state homes, it will pay IN FULL for desperate individuals who have nowhere else to go to stay at a private care home.

The number of free (government-paid) places in private care homes is restricted for reasons that will be obvious, and those places are meant to be for the most pressing and needy cases.

The government-paid place in a private care home that should go to Joe Attard is instead occupied by Mr Tanti, whose son-in-law runs the government. The arrangements were made after his son-in-law became prime minister.

While Mr Attard shivers through the night on hard ground in the open, Mr Tanti stays for free at a home where others have to sell their property or get financial help from their children to pay residential fees and other costs of more than €20,000 a year.

Joseph and Michelle Muscat’s behaviour is not 21st-century European socialism. It is Baku-style greed and abuse.

Joe Attard sleeps outdoors on hard ground while the Prime Minister’s father-in-law occupied a state-paid place in a private care home that is meant to be for people like Mr Attard