Tackling tourism's problems

We have been reading accounts of the debate on tourism. The exchange rate has put off many long-stay elderly people who keep our hotels open during winter and give continuous employment to the workers at these hotels. It is very expensive to live in Malta as a visitor.

You have too many hotels and are building more. The hotels being built are to attract higher-spending tourists but no one is daring to face the reasons why tourists may come to Malta but never return.

They ignore the fact that each of these people share their experiences with friends and neighbours when they return home. In the UK, almost half the nestling birds are killed by pampered well-fed cats. This killing is out of sight and so can be overlooked by cat owners. In Malta, the killing is in the open and the methods used spoil the landscape and create danger to anyone who walks in the countryside.

Unless and until there is political will in both parties to curb these excesses by the few, an end to the shameful bribery of the electorate by the Nationalist Party, with their change of the law to allow shooting by 18-year-olds, and their blatant misuse of government land for electoral advantage, it will get worse.

The Labour Party must also face their responsibility to maintain the environment. We have introduced three generations of our family to Malta; all have been shot at or screamed at with long streams of abuse in your delightful countryside. We have never trespassed, never caused damage. No one will return despite the wonderful friendliness of most of the people they have met. Being shot at once is enough.

The police shrug and say do not walk in the countryside. I asked a warden to book the next vehicle to come around the corner with no silencer. This was a vast diesel-powered machine belching fumes with an open exhaust reverberating off the stone walls in the narrow street, making life a misery for everybody around.

The warden shrugged: "It is a government machine". The test of whether the government of Malta is a competent government will be if it does not dig itself a bigger hole by using the quarries next to the temples for a landfill.

"Whoever pays the piper chooses the tune"; statistically so-called independent reports back up the arguments of those that commission them.