Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a strange and haunting poem. It was first published in 1798, the year Napoleon landed in Malta and ousted the Knights of St John.
The old sailor narrates the story of a dreadful sea voyage that was going reasonably well until he killed an albatross with his crossbow. For the rest of the nightmarish journey, the bird hangs around his neck as a symbol of his bad faith, a visual reminder of his grave mistake.
He and his fellow sailors are surrounded by awful, slimy sea creatures and serpents, until the rotting ship sinks in a whirlpool.
Unless the Prime Minister takes action, this scheming bird will hang around the Cabinet’s neck until the next election
The albatross is a large sea bird, and likes to live and breed on small remote islands. Over the past week, political observers noticed that a rare variety of the species, the Albatrossus panamus, is nesting on the roof of Castille.
Unless the Prime Minister takes action, this scheming bird will hang around the Cabinet’s neck until the next election.
However, many feeble and desperate attempts the government makes to chase the repugnant albatross into the arms of Ann Fenech, the Opposition and anyone else who gets in the way, the bird will not budge.
There is only one solution to Panamagate: resignations. Once gangrene sets in, the rot must be cut away.
• One of the many political pre-electoral promises was to the owners of the monti market stalls in Valletta, to move to Ordnance Street.
After the impasse that arose once this back-room agreement became more widely known, Economy Minister Chris Cardona has discovered a way to get out of the hole. Reach into the public coffers and line the pockets of the market vendors with silver.
The area near the Parliament building has to be left free, and all the stalls cannot fit into the other side of Ordnance Street. The market must therefore shrink considerably to move there. Accordingly, half the market vendors will now receive €80,000 each to give up their stalls, a total of €3 million of taxpayers’ money.
Seeing the unappealing junk that these stalls sell, I won’t miss them. Various monti vendors have said they are doing badly but have no intention of diversifying their products.
Still, it is a pity that Valletta does not have a thriving and attractive outdoor market. Perhaps €3 million could have gone towards innovative ideas to revamp the market, instead of closing down half the stalls to fulfil the promise of Ordnance Street.
• Environment Minister Leo Brincat has announced that an area near Żonqor Point is to be managed as the ‘Tal-Inwadar national park’. This piece of land was earmarked as a park in 2006, but the idea remained on paper.
This initiative is welcome, as good management will ensure long-term protection of this open space. Naturally, it is evident to anyone in the field that the project is intended to water down anger at the transfer of a large tract of adjacent public land to a Jordanian educational institution.
A shadow of cynicism therefore hovers over the announcement. Still, a commitment to actively manage an area of countryside is hardly a common occurrence and it is a positive step.
Last year, a public survey showed that 88 per cent of the population believe that Malta should have more protected nature sites. Fifty-six per cent were very concerned about the spread of building across the countryside, and 80 per cent thought the government should stop more building in the countryside.
The same survey showed almost unanimous agreement that the countryside needs to be protected more, with 97 per cent of the population supporting this view.
On Dissett last Wednesday, the Prime Minister stressed his government had only promoted one large project outside development zones, the Żonqor institute, implying that not much countryside has been given up for construction recently.
Ahem, not quite. In 2014 the government introduced a new policy for rural areas, followed by a string of other building policies focused on the countryside. These immediately sparked major concerns among environmental NGOs that the guidelines were too lax and could encourage widespread abuse.
A continual stream of building permits in the countryside are issued by the Planning Authority on a weekly basis. Individually they may not be massive projects, but cumulatively the amount is huge.
The collective impact of numerous permits is ignored by our planning system. For example, three projects are currently proposed for Wied Għomor, the last remaining green area between San Ġwann and Swieqi. If approved, they will completely change the character of the valley.
The applications are for an old people’s home, villas and a tourist village. Besides their own footprint, each of these will require adequate access roads, lighting and services infrastructure, all adding up to reduce natural spaces.
These three projects should be assessed holistically, to understand their collective impact on the shrinking valley. Instead, the planning system will wear its usual blinkers and process them separately. The Mepa demerger has done nothing to sort out this fundamental flaw in the planning system, which does not see the wood for the trees.
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