Unfinished construction at Cospicua waterfront

There are certain things that distinguish Malta as a place worth visiting, including its remarkable dgħajsa, the regattas and the regatta rowing clubs, largely around Grand Harbour. These hand-made painted wooden racing boats are truly beautiful.

There is also the particularity and pride in the local community that these regatta clubs reflect.

The construction work near the Cospicua regatta club in Dockyard-Galley Creek off Grand Harbour began in 2011. It is still going on and in an incredibly leisurely fashion, with no end in sight after more than 16 months of disruption, inconvenience and worse.

There used to be a pleasant walk from Vittoriosa to the Cospicua boat club alongside Dockyard-Galley Creek. It has been a construction site for more than a year. The regatta club ramp has vanished and each wooden dgħajsa has to be carried to and from the boat house through a construction site that for the past year has looked as if a local revolt has resulted in a serious bombing campaign that is still in progress.

The same can be said for the rest of the Cospicua waterfront, which is still experiencing, to its inhabitants’ cost, an unending so-called regeneration project.

If you go there today you will be appalled to find that unfinished construction work has resulted in lakes of stagnant smelly water breeding mosquitoes. Dockyard-Galley Creek is now filthy. At the end of the creek, the water stinks.

Bilge water is being pumped into the waters of Dockyard Creek from some of the many pleasure boats that are moored in the Grand Harbour Marina.

Worse still, the quantity of discharged oil from the motor vessels moored in the Grand Harbour Marina, some for major dock repair work, has discoloured the paintwork of the regatta club’s boats.

Is it not time for the polluter to pay?

Furthermore, is it not right to actually finish one on-going project – the Cospicua waterfront – before starting the next, namely the digging up and repaving the entire adjacent Senglea waterfront?