Labour stalwart Joe Brincat, former deputy leader, dies at 80

Labour stalwart Joe Brincat, a former deputy leader who served under Dom Mintoff, Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici, and Alfred Sant, has passed away. He was 80.

Brincat remained active in his legal career right to the end, often seen puffing on his trademark cheroot outside the law courts, whilst being vocal on his political beliefs on social media. After the age of 70, he took on legal aid cases, a hefty caseload which he carried forward right to the last weeks of his life.

First elected as MP in 1971, Brincat was made Labour’s first ever deputy leader for party affairs in 1976, a post specifically created as a way of managing the Labour Party after its election to power five years earlier. He had fended off the public works minister, Lorry Sant, widely suspected of corrupt practices.

His father-in-law was Anton Buttigieg, the Labour deputy leader for parliamentary affairs who in 1976 was made President of the Republic.

By the 1980s, the Mintoff administration’s ministers had absorbed the party’s activists into the government machine, and sitting ministers were vying to replace prime minister Dom Mintoff. Sant was a frontrunner, but another candidate was Joe Brincat.

Eventually, Mintoff hand-picked the GWU’s lawyer, Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici, to install as his deputy leader for party affairs, while Brincat was sworn in as minister of justice, lands, housing and parliamentary affairs in 1981.

Brincat made his mark in 1985 by being the only Labour MP to be present at the funeral of Raymond Caruana, a young activist attending a social reception when he was murdered from a volley of bullets fired on the PN’s Gudja club’s façade.

In 1992, Brincat’s bid for Labour leader was foiled when delegates pushed through Lino Spiteri and Alfred Sant to the run-off, eventually won by Sant. Having been returned to the House always since 1971, he resigned the Labour parliamentary group in late 1995 in a fall-out with Labour leader Alfred Sant.

By that time, he had also put forward a private members’ bill for the introduction of divorce. The bill never made it on the agenda.

He then reconciled with Sant and went on to become deputy leader in 1998 after the resignation of George Abela. He was re-elected to the House in 2003, but he lost his seat in 2008 after seeing his fourth district vote collapse from 2,382 to just 164 votes.

The Labour Party saluted the memory of Brincat, saying the former deputy leader would be remembered for his principles of social justice.

“His loss has shocked us,” said Prime Minister Robert Abela. “His contribution to the Labour Party, its governments and the parliament, has been enormous. His was a voice in favour of justice and socialists principles. I have always admired his honesty and tenacity as a formidable adversary in the law courts, and always a loyal one.”

Former prime minister Alfred Sant said Brincat was a man of honesty, sincerity, and strong-willed in his defence of workers’ interests. “We had our differences, which we later mended, and he was a source of advice, which I always appreciated.”

Sant said Brincat was a pillar for him “when the entire establishment was squarely against Labour.”

Former prime minister Joseph Muscat said he had visited the former MP at his hospital bed while his father was undergoing treatment, describing the frail man as lucid of mind and ready to dispense him with advice. “We shared the same Burmarrad roots, and Joe passed through his own martyrdom after facing unfair accusations abroad. A story he enjoyed recalling from his time as housing minister was when he gathered all the applicants who asked that they be prioritised, in the Strangers’ Gallery, and asked them to look each other in the face to see what they would have done.”

Muscat – now facing charges of corruption over the Vitals PPP – could not resist making a reference to his own legal ‘martyrdom’. He said Brincat had convinced him to remove the prescription on crimes of corruption for politicians, which previously protected sitting ministers from future charges of corruption. “I have no regrets of having done it. As he himself told me the last we met, we both sleep well as night.”

In his last years he was still making his political utterances on Facebook, vociferously defending the Labour administration when the public inquiry into the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia was launched: he claimed the three-judge inquiry board had not been administered an oath of impartiality “as a sign of goodwill”, saying that this was contrary to the rule of law.

MaltaToday was recently embroiled in defamation proceedings filed by Brincat, over the reports of his 1987 arrest in Italy together with a client. He had been scouting a damaged car belonging to Maltese national Colin Shires, after the latter crashed it in a motoring incident in southern Italy. Brincat and Shires’s wife were arrested by police at the compound where the car, stashed with undeclared jewellery and cash, was being kept in judicial custody. Brincat was eventually released from incarceration only because of the Maltese government’s intervention, specifically that of then foreign minister Guido de Marco. Two years later the same Italian court found Brincat guilty and condemned him to four months’ imprisonment and a fine of 400,000 Italian Lira.

Born in Gzira in 1944, Brincat studied at the Seminary and the Lyceum before embarking on a religious vocation at the Friars Minors.

Studying philosophy, he obtained his Bachelors of Arts from the University of London in Latin, philosophy, and English literature but left the Order to become a teacher.

In 1966, now working in the civil service, he obtained a promotion to the law courts as a deputy registrar, and there pursued his studies to first obtain a B.Sc. degree in economics in 1967, and three years later graduating LL.D as a lawyer.

At the same time, he was active in Labour youth politics, as editor of The Voice of Malta. A regular contributor to the Labour and youth press, he published the novels Għall-Erwieħ xi Ħdud Għaddejt (1987) and the Rebħ Lest għal Mudest (1974).

Brincat married Rose Buttigieg in 1970 and had two children, Antonella and Stefan.