Editorial

It was Lord Byron who, on arrival in Malta, complained that this was the island of "yells, bells and smells". While the smells have thankfully been removed with better public hygiene, the "yells and bells," signifying the cacophony of noise that is Malta today, have not. This is a densely populated and incredibly noisy country. Needless car horn use, souped up vehicles, blaring radios, open-air discos, rowdy neighbours - everywhere one is assailed by noise, never more so than in the summer months when our village festas and the utterly pointless noise of mortali (petards) rend the air.

All these thoughts have been brought to a head for the long-suffering Maltese by an incident involving the July 26 Sta Venera Fireworks Club and the Marsa Sports Club.

The Marsa Sports Club had argued, among other things, that the letting off of fireworks was causing disproportionate inconvenience to the public when compared to what fireworks enthusiasts considered to be their "rights".

In turning down the Marsa Sports Club's application, Chief Justice Vincent Degaetano commented, inter alia, in a scathing description of the inconvenience caused by petards, that the "savage bombardment and the senseless explosions" that accompanied or preceded fireworks displays during the festas caused great inconvenience and terrified pets and children, as well as the not-so-young, and disturbed people who were ill or who could not move away from the area where fireworks were being let off.

However, surprisingly, he went on to say that "no law existed in Malta that regulated noise pollution". The Registrar of the Civil Courts later corrected the impression that there was no law regulating noise pollution by saying that what the Chief Justice had said in his judgement was that "despite the fine words of the Legal Notice 193 of 2004 and the EU Directive 2002/49/EC, this court knows of no regulations that in any form regulate what is effectively higher levels of 'noise pollution' because of the type of petards used".

While, therefore, there are laws in Malta regulating noise pollution, there are none regulating the worst noise offenders - petards according to size and type. Simply put, what the Chief Justice was saying is that if we were playing music at full volume at two o'clock in the morning, or wielding a jackhammer by day at higher decibel levels than those laid down, we could be prosecuted for causing noise pollution, while if we set off large petards throughout the months of May to October we would not be.

As so often happens then, the ordinary man in the street comes away thinking that the law is an ass. For reasons best known to themselves, our legislators have omitted to ensure - whether deliberately or not - that our noise pollution legislation covered the worst offenders in our land: the makers and users of mortali. A cynic might think that this is another instance of legislators kowtowing to a special interest group, the fireworks enthusiasts. Whether or not such cynicism is justified is immaterial. The fact of the matter is that Malta's Chief Justice has exposed a gaping loophole in our law which, in the greater public interest, needs urgently to be closed. The noise pollution engendered by petards is no longer acceptable and should be brought strictly under control.