I am a firm believer in education. However, I am against the ancient way of educating children, where some teachers used to be at liberty to even hit students. This does not make me less committed to the belief that education is the way forward for our country, rather it makes me more committed. Similarly I am in favour of creating waste-to-energy plants and the fact that I am against the old way of slamming a decision down the peoples’ throat and bulldozing ahead does not make me less committed to the belief that recycling is the way forward for our country.

The whole process for the building of the new and much larger Sant’Antnin plant was rotten from start to finish. It is true that the EU ruled that insofar as its own rules are concerned things were in order but insofar as local rules are concerned things were definitely not in order. Suffice it to say that when the Malta Environment and Planning Authority asked the developer to come up with the alternative sites on where the new and much larger recycling plant could be built, the two alternative sites which were brought forward were too small to accommodate even the old recycling plant!

The government from day one decided to build the new and much larger recycling plant in the place previously occupied by the old plant come what may, independently of the outcome of the health-assessment studies (some of which were not carried out anyway due to them being too expensive for Malta), independently of the fact that the population of Marsascala had increased tremendously in the meantime. The government then worked backwards to justify the choice of site. All the planning stages were subsequently a farce, with the majority of adjudicators acting under direction from the government and in one case having a direct pecuniary interest with the company which won the tender for the construction of the plant.

There are indeed a lot of lessons to learn from the Sant’Antnin saga and once the ongoing judicial process is over, many more lessons will still have to be learned.