On divorce, Austin Gatt’s self-indulgence could well be felt at the next election

The disloyalty is primarily to his Prime Minister, who has been carefully navigating a delicate path on an issue which divides his core party supporters. Dr Gatt’s interventions – which one presumes were made in a personal capacity, not as a Cabinet Minister since family policy is well outside his remit – have deliberately blown that precarious approach apart in order to bounce the Prime Minister and the party into a decision of which he personally approves.

Letting loose a bull in a china shop could not have been further from the Prime Minister’s interests at this stage. The consequences of Dr Gatt’s self-indulgence could well be felt at the next general election.

That he is also disloyal to a fellow Nationalist Member of Parliament, who has had the moral courage to bring forward a Private Member’s Bill to right a perceived wrong in our society – as he is entitled to do in the best traditions of a parliamentary democracy –  simply compounds his ill-judged public intervention.

But there is also an all-pervading smell of rank hypocrisy about his articles. Nowhere in his 9,000 words does he seek to reconcile the contradictory position he and his party, and the government of which he forms a part, have taken on the issue of cohabitation (which the Church regards as adultery and of which it strongly disapproves), compared to the stand on divorce.

Moreover, in his over-zealous attack on divorce he fails to confront the obvious moral and social deficiencies of cohabitation, which he presumably supports, or the reasons why he is prepared to support the one and not the other.

As to the series of articles themselves, rarely have we been treated to so much special pleading, statistical sleight of hand and selective, shallow and specious arguments. They were among the most muddled and facile ever to flow from a senior politician’s pen. They were, moreover, couched in language where one could sense, from the liberal scattering of exclamation marks, that he was bellowing at the reader in the way politicians who have been in power too long tend to do.

For the minister who was responsible for dealing so insensitively with the introduction of the new water and electricity rates now to pass himself off as the champion of the family takes a very special type of thick skin. I dare say he has left enlightened and intelligent supporters of his party ashamed to belong to it.

His attempt at wearing the mantle of Thatcher made one choke with incredulity. His simplistic, not to say misleading, account of the history of divorce, his grotesque attempt at drawing an analogy between abortion and euthanasia and divorce, his dishonest references to ‘quickie divorces’ when he knows all too well that this is not on the agenda, and the gratuitous accusation that those supporting divorce are only doing so for personal reasons lead one to conclude that he is either being deliberately disingenuous or obtuse, or both.

I cannot imagine how such primitive nonsense could convince anyone. It could only convince someone who is already convinced. When the verbiage in Dr Gatt’s articles – riddled as they are with non-sequitors and statements of the obvious – are stripped away, what I understand he is trying to tell us, in his own hectoring and splenetic style, are two things. First, he asserts that from the statistics he presents our rate of marriage breakdown is not so bad as to require the divorce solution to be introduced (“Is marriage in Malta in such dire straits that divorce is the only way to go?”). Secondly, the introduction of divorce will be detrimental to the common good of Maltese society (“the good of society has to come before the good of the individual”).

Dealing first with the statistics, let us confront clearly the number of individuals in Malta in broken marriages. To deal, as Dr Gatt does, in percentage changes to marriage rates is simply a means of disguising the human impact of broken marriages and the pain which the individuals suffer. Every individual marriage breakdown represents a human tragedy. Raw statistics alone cannot begin to tell the full story. They certainly cannot begin to express the suffering of all those involved.

In 1995, there were just over 5000 individuals whose marriages had been annulled, where foreign divorces had been obtained, or who had been granted legal separations. By 2005, this figure had risen to over 11,000. The Church’s respected Institute for the Signs of the Times, Discern, has estimated that this figure will rise to 35,000 in four years’ time.

All the evidence provided to me by the Curia and the Civil Courts for the years 2006, 2007 and 2008 (the latest figures available to me) indicate that, adding the number of ‘new or introduced ecclesiastical and civil annulments, including annulments pending’, together with the number of ‘sworn separation applications submitted or mediations introduced, including pending cases’, there were about 13,000 individuals ( 6360 couples) whose cases for annulment or separation were in the pipeline for those three years alone. It is fallacious to conclude, as he did, that “separation numbers peaked in 2005 and for the last five years have seen a gradual decline” as this simply reflects the rate at which the Courts and Tribunals deal with cases. It takes no account of the huge numbers in the pipe-line and the time-lag between the start of a case and its resolution.

Even making some allowance for cases that are not proceeded with, coming on top of the 13,354 individuals in broken marriages recorded in the 2005 census, and bearing in mind the numbers for the unrecorded six years 2009 to 2014, it is clear that Discern’s assessment of 35,000 individuals in broken marriages by 2015 is well on the way to being reached, if not exceeded. And that figure of course takes no account of the children of those broken marriages, perhaps at a very conservative estimate another 21,000 individual human beings caught up in the current social limbo of broken marriages – over 56,000 lives directly affected.

Is Dr Gatt to persist in pretending there is no problem and that therefore there is no need to tackle it by all means possible, including the new legal remedy to allow remarriage being proposed in the Private Member’s Bill? There can be no valid case for arguing – as Dr Gatt does – that since, by his selective use of statistics, the proportion of broken marriages is relatively low (‘insignificant’ in his words, a contention I would strenuously dispute, as I have shown) the case for remarriage after legal separation has not been made.

Marriage breakdowns are now an ever-present reality, and escalating steeply. While, like Dr Gatt, every person who is in favour of the introduction of the legal remedy of divorce, supports all efforts to strengthen marriage in every way possible, the social phenomenon of accelerating marriage breakdown cannot be wished away, as Dr Gatt would have us believe. His attempt to down-play the effects of all these broken marriages in order to support his cynical contention that there is no need to consider any other legal remedies than those already in place is unworthy of any parliamentarian who embraces Christian-democratic values and social justice.

As Dr Gatt would surely agree, the crux of the question is: Is the wider good of society best served by denying the chance of remarriage to those whose marriages have broken down, or by encouraging cohabitation, as is the case today?

A well-ordered legal process should ensure that, even when marital breakdown occurs, it is regulated fairly in such a way as to reduce, not exacerbate, its wider impact on society – as a cohabitation law would. Allowing people to remarry after legal separation is part of the most just legal response to the problem. Without this, people have simply sought their own solutions once they have separated, with the dire social consequences which we witness in Malta today. It is cohabitation which is inimical to the institution of marriage, not the right to marry after legal separation.   

At the core of the argument is the conviction that the dissolution of a marriage which has already irrevocably broken down may be sanctioned to prevent greater harm to the common good of our society caused by the dislocation and instability of cohabitation, and the injustice of preventing those who are already legally separated from remarrying. The benefits to the wider public good of society which flow from introducing the greater security, status and stability (especially for the children) that comes from marriage would be beneficial, not detrimental, to Maltese society. This is the rational and practical way to advance the cause of the institution of marriage.   

Nostalgia for the state of marriage in Malta as it was three or four decades ago – buttressed by a perverse muddling of symptoms and causes as demonstrated by Dr Austin Gatt – is a poor substitute for practical policy-making. It is a sign of collective myopia, an unwillingness to confront information that challenges the realities.

Martin Scicluna is the chairperson of the Today Public Policy Institute and lead author of For Better Or Worse: remarriage after legal separation