When the futility of history risks overwhelming one, all one is left with to bear the crushing disappointment in sheer existence, is some indulgence in the ironies.

Consider the immediate complaint in Parliament from PN MP Claudette Buttigieg who heard Rosianne Cutajar call out ‘qaħba’ (‘whore’) in her general direction while she (Buttigieg) was criticising her (Cutajar’s) earlier remarks.

Rosianne Cutajar assured Claudette Buttigieg she wasn’t referring to her. Significantly, the disgraced former junior minister and newly minted Parliamentary overseer of health policy stopped short of denying having used the unparliamentary term ‘qaħba’. Quite possibly that could be because she did not have the time and the speed to think of some innocuous word that sounds like qaħba to gaslight everyone with the accusation that they misheard her.

She could have tried ħaqalanqas. It worked for some.

The schoolyard excuse of ‘I didn’t mean you’ was enough for that one-sided, partisan, poor excuse for a Speaker Anġlu Farrugia to pout his lips in that specifically Maltese way of communicating he considered the matter as too puerile to take further. Of course, if someone else dared address Rosianne Cutajar qaħba the Speaker would stand tall in furious anger, casting angry thunderbolts at the offender.

That’s not least because Rosianne Cutajar would have raised hell.

Consider how she sued Godfrey Leone Ganado for posting on Facebook the phrase “il-qaħba milli jkollha ttik” in reference to something she had said or done. The court agreed with Cutajar that Godfrey Leone Ganado did not have the poetic license to use the Maltese idiom. Not in her case, anyway. The phrase and its milder alternative about the stock held by a pharmacist can be used in reference to anyone (who is neither a prostitute nor a pharmacist). Say someone wishes to criticise the quality of my writing. They would say of me that I can only deliver up to the (poor) standard I can reach. Like a prostitute I can only be as good as I am or like a pharmacist I can only supply medicines I have in stock.

Perhaps because the reference struck too close to home in her case, the court sided with Rosianne Cutajar and ordered Godfrey Leone Ganado and Rachel Williams (for failing to remove Leone Ganado’s comment from her Facebook page) to pay her compensation.

So Rosianne Cutajar not only knows just how offensive the term ‘qaħba’ is for having so very publicly proclaimed having been so offended by it that only a court judgement could salve her metaphorical wounds. She has also collected €800 as compensation for having had the term used in her vague, incidental direction.

So, here’s my question to Rosianne Cutajar. Granted, with much scepticism but for the sake of argument, that you didn’t mean to insult Claudette Buttigieg, to whom might I ask were you referring when you used the insulting term? Who else did you mean to denigrate to such an extent that if you had used the term outside parliament, you’d owe them €800 and if you used it in a parliament presided by any other Speaker but Anġlu Farrugia you’d have been thrown out until you came crawling back with an apology? Why did you feel entitled to use it to describe someone, anyone, when you had been so indignant when you chose to believe it was used to describe you?

Ara veru, l-ispiżjara milli jkollha ttik …