Malta women’s shelter rejects Mqabba deputy mayor’s donation over sexist jokes

A women’s refuge in Malta has refused a €1,000 cheque from the deputy mayor of Mqabda, saying the politician’s recent social-media posts “mock the very concept of safe spaces for women”.
The snub has ignited a village-level row that is fast becoming a national conversation on how seriously Malta’s smallest municipalities take gender-based violence.

Dar Merħba Bik, the 14-bed shelter that has housed 312 women and 187 children since 2019, returned the donation on Tuesday morning after members of its management board googled the donor: Clayton Bonnici, Nationalist councillor and newly elected deputy mayor of the south-western village.
What they found were Facebook comments posted last month beneath a Times of Malta story on the shelter’s funding shortfall. Bonnici wrote that “maybe if women stopped dramatising every argument, shelters wouldn’t be so full”, and later joked that “a subscription to Netflix is cheaper than a husband”. Screenshots circulated inside the shelter’s WhatsApp group within minutes.

“Accepting money from someone who ridicules survivors would be a betrayal of every woman who has crossed our threshold clutching a police report and a bin-bag of clothes,” shelter coordinator Paula Mifsud told Hot Malta.
The board voted unanimously to return the cheque, hand-delivered by a council messenger the previous afternoon. A one-sentence letter, signed by Mifsud, read: “We decline this donation in order to protect the psychological safety of our residents.”

Mqabba, a 3,000-resident village famous for its fireworks factory and baroque parish church, now finds itself at the epicentre of Malta’s ongoing #Me reckoning.
While the island passed the Istanbul Convention into law in 2018 and opened the first government-funded shelter in 2021, grassroots organisations say municipal politics remains a boys’ club. Only nine of Malta’s 68 mayors are women; Mqabba has never had one.

Bonnici, 42, who runs a tyre-import business, insists his comments were “taken out of context”. Reached by phone, he told Hot Malta: “I’m a jovial guy. My wife laughed at the Netflix joke. If we start policing humour, we’ll end up in a North Korea of political correctness.”
He added that the donation was “personal, not council money” and came after he sold two vintage motorcycles. “I thought I was helping. Next time I’ll send it to Puttinu instead.”

The backlash was swift. By Wednesday morning, an online petition calling for Bonnici’s resignation had gathered 4,700 signatures—more than the total votes cast in the entire Mqabba local election.
Village band club corridors—traditionally the pulse of rural politics—are split. “My son volunteers at the shelter’s car-wash fundraiser,” said 68-year-old pensioner Rita Farrugia outside the parish church. “We teach our boys to respect women. The deputy mayor should have known better.”
But others shrug. “It’s Facebook, not the Council chamber,” remarked bartender Marco Zahra between espresso orders. “We’ve bigger problems—parking, dust, street lighting.”

Dar Merħba Bik is now experiencing an unexpected windfall. After news of the rejected donation broke, mobile-banking notifications began pinging every few minutes.
By Wednesday night, the shelter had received €11,432 in individual donations, including €50 from a 12-year-old girl in Żurrieq who sold homemade kwareżimal.
Local companies have also stepped in: a Gżira stationery supplier pledged a year’s worth of nappies; a Sliema restaurant offered 200 frozen meals. “Malta can be small-minded, but it also has a huge heart,” Mifsud said, visibly moved as she showed us crates of baby formula stacked in the corridor.

The Labour government, wary of losing female swing voters in next year’s European elections, seized the moment.
Parliamentary Secretary for Equality Rebecca Buttigieg announced an extra €200,000 in quarterly funding for all NGOs in the shelter network, while MEP candidate Daniel Attard visited the refuge with a bouquet of tulips and a promise to push for tougher cyber-harassment laws.

Still, women’s rights activists warn that symbolic gestures mask structural gaps. “Refusing one sexist donation makes headlines, but we still turn away five mothers a week because we’re full,” Mifsud stressed.
She wants compulsory gender-sensitivity training for every local council and a 40% quota for women on village committees—measures that would bite harder than any Facebook apology.

For now, the €1,000 cheque sits on the shelter’s reception desk, stamped “VOID” in red ink, a paper monument to a village forced to confront its conscience.
Whether Mqabba’s fireworks this August will light up the sky in celebration—or distraction—remains to be seen.