The Italians use the idiom ‘da quale pulpito viene la predica’.
Look at this sermon by one Justin Farrugia, an audio-visual company owner who, bucking the trend set by other film-makers and TV producers, thought that the €2 million film awards night (the figure is unconfirmed but undenied by the government) was a great idea.
Justin Farrugia says that the artists who boycotted the event and criticised it for being an act of disproportionate profligacy spoke that way because they have only ever produced rubbish anyway. Their views, Justin Farrugia implicitly argues, shouldn’t count.
You wonder why someone would speak like that of their professional colleagues. You wonder why anyone on his side of the industry – the people who actually make the product, rather than the Ministers whose only contribution to the industry is looking good in their hired tuxedos – would publicly try to justify spending €2 million on any PR event for a purely domestic audience in one evening when the support given to the film industry, such as it is, during the rest of the year is so much less than that.
And then someone reminds you where you’ve seen the name Justin Farrugia before.
He’s the brother of Kurt Farrugia, known in his previous life as Joseph Muscat’s crutch as Kurt il-Coconut.
Unlike the other producers whom he accuses of making rubbish, Justin Farrugia has benefited considerably from the generosity of public funding. Read more in this piece I had written about the subject in the summer of 2019.
Let’s use the English idiom, now. That’s rich coming from Justin Farrugia.