Probably, if you’re reading this, you never really doubted it. Probably, if you’re reading this, like me you felt pangs of guilt on 16 October 2017 when you thought that if you had done more to say that you thought Daphne was right her powerful voice would have reached further.
I do not suggest you forgive yourself. I know I don’t.
Maybe it’s my residual Judeo-Christian moral framework, but guilt spurred me on. It still does. When I see that defeated and scared look on Keith Schembri’s face I push away any momentary feelings of Schadenfreude.
Instead, I’m left with regret. I’m left with the guilt that I hadn’t done enough, I hadn’t thrown myself into applying the pressure the institutions needed to do their bloody job. And soon the guilt of recollection of my amused silence as I read what Daphne had written the night before rushes over me.
Daphne was right. But what’s worse is I knew Daphne was right.
Some trolls taunt me asking where I was when …
You know the type. Sometimes I’m asked where I was when Karin Grech was killed and the answer is probably being breastfed.
But ask me where I was when Daphne was chasing Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi and Chris Cardona and Joseph Muscat and my answer is reading what she was writing from a comfortable apartment in Lagos or in Jakarta or in Harare telling myself it’s probably better if I stay quiet so that I can protect my job.
It’s too late for her now. But at least I know that there wasn’t just a lonely, angry woman outside Kordin yesterday shouting “Daphne kellha raġun” at Keith Schembri’s van escorting him into prison. There were many people watching it on their phones who dismissed Daphne as a Nazzjonalista indannata, or an elitist snob who could not stand a tifel Laburist minn Bormla making it, who yesterday said ‘Daphne was right’.
On with the job. Let’s finish what we started. Let’s make them pay.
For Daphne. For her family. For Malta.