MY REFLECTIONS ON THE IRONY OF LIFE – work hard, help your community, your neighbour, your country …

I do not think I am the first person to write that there is no justice in life; that life is unfair.

Some two weeks ago a friend and a former colleague of mine passed away in hospital after a debilitating illness. He was a driver who worked at STMicroelectronics and worked under my charge at the time. He was a family man, loved and looked after his wife and his children; he worked hard and had a good attendance record.

Being one of a team of drivers his job was to drive a freight truck to the airport several times a day taking essential microelectronic products produced by the company to be air-freighted, boosting the country’s exports while helping to earn the company money to help pay wages and to benefit the national economy in general.

This is by no means a glamorous job, a run-of-the-mill job, one of those jobs that most people don’t even notice because - he is “only a driver”. Yet, by his endeavours he raised and kept a family, helped his community, helped earn millions of euros of exports for the company and the country and in general lived a good life – not to say he was perfect and did not occasionally sin – but he lived a good life.

Contrast this with a person who daily wrote, exuded bile, venom and hate, despised all those who did not agree with her, caused personal damage to people, disrupted their family life and even contrived a story intended to humiliate her country’s democratically-elected Prime Minister and his family and in equal measure damage the whole country and its people.

Both have now passed on. One suffered tremendous pains from a debilitating illness; the other albeit as the result of a macabre murder.

The hard-working man was deeply mourned by family, his relatives, friends, colleagues and people who knew him – and that’s that.

The other was deeply mourned by family, her relatives, friends, colleagues and people who knew her. The Archbishop of Malta celebrated her funeral Mass; the President of the European Parliament attended her funeral and named a Hall in the Euro Parliament in her honour; the international media keeps nauseatingly pestering the country with futile questions while obviously extremely professional investigations are taking place; delegations keep coming and going; some people want to erect a monument; others march monthly in her honour, and now ...

...now Parliament agrees NOT to convene for one day in her honour and commemoration.

That is the irony of life. Yes, there is no justice in life.

Yes, life is unfair.

ALBERT JEROME FENECH