I would like to comment on three letters which appeared on December 21 in The Sunday Times of Malta.

In the first letter, Joe Portelli from Nadur rightly points out: “The government will certainly not make Malta the best in Europe if it rewards illegalities by sanctioning batching plants and sites for parking construction machinery in the countryside, and all this to appease some greedy developers who do not have sustainable development and the natural beauty of Gozo at heart.” Please wake up. While Gozo is a jewel, the people who live there do nothing to keep it that way.

In the second letter, Joe Aquilina St John from Mellieħa also rightly complains that: “Quality tourism would want a quality environment and Malta does not offer this.” This is correct. Besides the traffic jams, air and noise pollution, roads full of potholes, rambling Rambos shooting birds in the countryside and grumpy faces in the service industry, where else in the world would a tourist be offered a toothpick to eat his French fried potatoes?

Or why does one have to beg for a napkin and then be offered what looks like a piece of toilet paper? Or local clubs and coffee shops where the bar attendant uses the same teaspoon, which then he leaves in a glass of contaminated water? Furthermore, in our great service industry, one often has to beg for his VAT receipt.

In the last letter, Bernard Vassallo from Swieqi says: “Moral degradation is a result of this excessive permissiveness and materialism. It is like a cancer eating away the muscle of our society.”

One has to point out that Maltese people were recently assessed as being close to the most obese, diabetic and asthmatic people on earth? Doesn’t this say it all?

As for the present day influx of mass tourism, this is only temporary – the effect of massive misleading advertising and marketing by our local ‘experts’ and which, like a child’s balloon, is likely to soon burst with a loud bang into our thin Mediterranean air.