Former Speaker pays tribute to Caruana Galizia: ‘We need to redeem ourselves as a nation’

Former Speaker of the House Myriam Spiteri Debono paid tribute to the journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia during a State remembrace ceremony for Victory Day.

Caruana Galizia was assassinated on 16 October 2017 in a car bomb.

Spiteri Debono, who presided as Speaker during the Labour administration of 1996-98, called for a newfound respect for investigative journalism as the fourth pillar of democracy.

“Raymond Caruana and Karin Grech were victims of the prevalent situation,” Spiteri Debono said of the deaths of Caruana, in 1986, who died from a hail of machine-guy bullets sprayed on the PN Gudja club; and Grech, who died at 15 from a letter-bomb addressed to her father, a strike-breaker during the doctors’ stirke of 1977.

“Daphne Caruana Galizia’s killing was different, it was brutal and macabre… with the determined intention of shutting her up, an execution connected to her investigate work as a journalist.”

The speech, delivered Monday 7 September outside the Victory Day monument where the Caruana Galizia memorial was set up in 2017, has not been disseminated by the Department of Information or the Office of the Speaker, which sent out the programme of events for the annual commemoration of the national day: the end of Italian hostilties during WWII in 1943 and the Great Siege victory over Ottoman invaders in 1565.

Spiteri Debono said the death of Caruana Galizia had switched on the nation’s “warning lights”. “It was a death that shocked us. It is difficult, indeed impossible, to heal the wound suffered by her family, the sorrow of those she loved and who loved her.

“We need to redeem ourselves as a nation. We need to unite, as we did in the past, for the necessary changes of our time, changes we have already started to do,” Spiteri Debono said.

The former Speaker and Labour MP called on the nation not to be lost in bickering and political point-scoring, “Pyrrhic victories or partisan battling without substance that only serve to create more division.”

“There is no one constant victory. It is a series of small victories that make a victory: the fight for what is right, for just and correct governance, is a continuous one and poses a challenge for us, day after day. We can never lose sight of the vigilance this needs, and for that we must be united. We need the backbone to see that we can mend what is broken, and what has long needed change and evolution, is fixed.”