Labour MP Franco Mercieca likened Gozitan’s lack of accessibility to Malta to a disability.

Speaking in Parliament on the adjournment he said statistics pointed to a decline in the Gozitan population with some school’s population going down by half.

The overall population remained stable because a number of people were registered as living in Gozo, although they did not reside there, because of the ferry benefits.

He noted that while the official population was around 30,000, his unscientific estimate was that only 20,000 people actually resided on the island. This was leading to a brain drain and a slow erosion of the Gozitan identity.

Although he was a believer in a permanent link, he opted to speak about the ferry service.

He said the fast ferry service being proposed was bound to eventually fail because it was not sustainable.

Gozo Channel’s new ticketing system was welcome but it was not enough. And it was hard to understand how such a company whose clients were always on the increase ended up making a loss.

One reason behind the loss was the fact that ferries were only being used at 47 per cent of their capacity. This showed that the company was wasting a lot of energy on low demand and services were not being well distributed.

Moreover, why should one get tickets from a ticket seller and not from ticket booths in different localities, for example?

The current ticketing system, he said, where tickets were scanned more than ones, was very expensive to run.

And to maximise its services, the company needed to learn more about its customers.

Why could trip tickets not be pre-booked at no extra charge, for example? The company could introduce a condition making pre-booked tickets non-transferrable from one trip to another.

Gozo Channel could also sector target and offer services from villages to the ferry, he said.