A culture of callousness – John Vassallo

Last week, following the 6,501st death on a FIFA World Cup building site in Qatar, the world was aghast at the utter cold-bloodedness of the Qatari sport minister. He considered this normal that a person dies and was angry at the questioner for asking about the death during the World Cup.

We, in Malta, seem to be suffering from the same sense of lack of empathy and insensitivity when it comes to loss of lives in our country.

During the last three or four years, many opinion makers, including myself, have written about deaths on our roads, deaths on our building sites and industrial parks, deaths in our prisons, deaths on the migrant boats being pushed out of our territorial waters to die, the murder of a black person allegedly by members of our armed forces, the brutal murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia and violence in Paceville and in Buġibba.

Nobody, however, has deemed it fit to join the dots and to analyse why Malta’s government does not seem to place value on people’s deaths.

Each time a death occurs on our roads there is a flurry of articles about this. A death on a building site such as the recent one in Corradino opens the floodgates on this particular subject and so...