I was not at all scandalised to read that an acre of foreshore at Delimara was up for sale. Surprised, possibly. The place is known to locals as Xifer l-Infern (‘the edge of hell’) and the asking price of €422,000 seemed a bit steep, even for such a Dantean prospect. I imagine there are cheaper ways of getting there, a benign and forgiving God notwithstanding.

Now I happen to be very familiar with the place. I also know that it is not the only stretch of shore that is privately owned. There are very many others, at Delimara and elsewhere. And, normally, if something can be privately owned, it can also legitimately be bought and sold by private parties.

This, then, was a non-story. Except it brought out the Karl Marx Collective Farm in enough people for it to become a minor scandal. The Nationalist Party quickly spotted another virgin in distress, and with it the chance to massage the so-called environmentalist vote. Minutes after the story broke, the party issued a statement that urged the government to expropriate the land, “to ensure it was used exclusively for a public aim and would continue to be enjoyed by the people in its natural state”.

On their part, the Front Ħarsien ODZ said that the Delimara patch was “a prime example of land which should form part of the public domain”, and that “the State should therefore expropriate the land accordingly, thus ensuring that it has such a status, in the interest of the common good”.

There are many reasons why both the PN and the Front are wrong – really, miserably wrong. That’s assuming they have anything to talk about at all, which in this case they don’t. There is nothing the matter with private property that comes up for sale, and in any case, the asking price suggests that development is not on the cards. If it were, an acre of foreshore would cost many millions of euros.

The sunny side of the coin is that some of the best-preserved land is privately owned, in Malta and certainly in Europe generally

Of course, it was listed as ‘ideal for a fish farming venture’, but that’s what estate agents are about. I was once told by one that a house I was interested in had side views of Mdina. Which was true, provided I installed a magnifying periscope.

But this is peripheral to my argument, which is that there are four reasons why expropriation would be madness. First, it would be a waste of taxpayers’ money. Expropriation only makes sense when the public stands to gain something. Thus if government expropriated a house to set up a clinic, the public would have paid money to gain the use of a clinic.

Only on this one there is nothing to be had. The public already has full right of access to it, simply because it is on the foreshore. As for protection, it is already protected as an ODZ area. The fact that it’s privately owned doesn’t mean that the owner can indulge their whims. That’s what ODZ is all about, except funnily enough the champions seem to have given up on the cause.

Second, there is some confusion here between ‘public’ and ‘protected’. The two are, in fact, very different, in principle as well as in practice. In principle, the law applies generally and doesn’t especially protect public places. (Why should it anyway?)

In practice, it would be very hard to show that public fares better than private. In fact, I rather think that the opposite is the case. Armier is in part public land, for example, and so was that side of Xgħajra where the monster that calls itself smart and urbane now squats.

The sunny side of the coin is that some of the best-preserved land is privately owned, in Malta and certainly in Europe generally. There are forests in Scotland and Germany that belong to private landowners. They are in excellent shape and allow the public full right of access. In Malta, substantial stretches of the pristine and largely accessible west coast are owned by old families.

There are many reasons why this might be so. In Malta, they include the State’s cavalier attitude with its own land, and the popular tendency to treat public land as res nullius and therefore free to be encroached upon and carved up at will. It also happens to be very hard to dislodge the complex tissue of political protection and downright enforcement lethargy that provide long-term security to encroachers on public land.

Delimara itself is a paragon. The problem there isn’t which bits of land are privately owned, and which aren’t. It’s that whole sections of the foreshore have been taken over by thugs who have no respect whatsoever for details like titles and public access. The words ‘public domain’ are meaningless to these goons, and expropriation isn’t about to put them off.

Still, my point isn’t that private is necessarily safer from development than public, or the other way round. It is that public land is at least as exposed to mischief as private land, which is why expropriation and protection are two different things.

The third reason why the PN and the Front are wrong is that it wouldn’t do to create a hierarchy of the common good. How should the State decide that a piece of land is or isn’t worth expropriating? And what happens to the bits that do not particularly titillate the activists, but are of public value anyway? Do they become second-class common good?

These are crucial questions, not least because the worst-case scenario would be one in which the State, on behalf of the common good, pits itself against private landowners. It would be a disastrous formula and quite uncalled for, given that there is no necessary contradiction between private ownership and public enjoyment. The foreshore is, or should be, a prime example of that coexistence. Where it isn’t, it’s because the law is not being enforced.

The fourth reason involves some imagi­native but not completely unrealistic thinking. I have in mind the possibility of engineered expropriation, in which the private owner of a ‘worthless’ piece of land could set up an expropriation, and therefore some dividend, simply by proposing some fanciful project or putting the land up for sale. As yet, we have no way of knowing if Xifer l-Infern is a case in point.

The Front are misguided on this one. (I won’t be so generous with the PN.) I think it’s because this is one of those occasions when common sense doesn’t help. It seems obvious that expropriating land would safeguard it against development. Except the truth is not so simple.

mafalzon@hotmail.com