Local people getting a rotten deal

Sunday, March 21, was the occasion of the spring equinox, and like many other people I ventured to view the phenomenon at the southern Mnajdra temple. However, I was informed by the officious custodian that only 40 tickets had been on sale, at about €15 apiece, and all had been taken. No additional persons would be admitted. Most of the visitors attending were English-speaking foreigners, and very few Maltese. Heritage Malta appears to give priority to foreigners who can easily pay €15, as against Maltese who find this entrance price rather steep, going by our smaller incomes.

My impression outside the Mnajdra new boundary was that the guiding was in English. And if this is so, I find our continued subservience to our colonial past distasteful and demeaning, as an island nation. My new friends watching outside the boundary commented in a similar vein. Why this return to colonialism on our Mediterranean island?

I see this even in church on Sunday Mass at Ta' L-Ibrag at 8.30 a.m., where the hymns are sung half in English and half in Maltese during a Mass in Maltese.

This pandering to English-speaking parishioners or church goers and neo-colonialism are, in my view, the result of an inferiority complex about our Maltese language, and quite intolerable. Our priests are trying to please people a bit too much, lest they lose parishioners. They do have a Mass in English at 12.15 p.m., if they would care to attend that, often the result of vanity and snobbery of the Sliema area, which couldn't live without being subservient to our former British colonial masters. But those days are long gone, or are they?

One doesn't expect Heritage Malta to make money on people's backs at exorbitant prices: €9 for admittance to Ħagar Qim and Mnajdra temples, €20 for the Hypogeum, and so on, with no reductions being considered. Maltese people are not figuring in Heritage Malta's equation.

They ought to have reduced admission prices, as Turkish people have in order to see the huge Roman Baths underneath Istanbul - there is one price for foreign visitors, and a lower price for local Turks. Why not here in Malta as well? With the present prices, regular local visitors are deterred from visiting our archaeological sites as often as they would require, for research and photography purposes.

Let us hope that, at Heritage Malta, better counsel will prevail.