Back in May, a Labour spokesman had harsh things to say about the sale of the dockyard to Palumbo Shipyards. As reported in The Times of May 13, 2010, he called it a “shameful and national disgrace”. Much as I may differ over the reasoning, which had mostly to do with the terms of the contract, I think Labour’s conclusion was spot on.

Terms of contract are important, especially when state coffers are concerned, but they tend quickly to be consigned to the history of political tug of war. Not so the outcomes of gormless planning, alas. For this is exactly what the sale of the dockyard has turned out to be. A few months into Palumbo’s tenure it’s become clear we have a major environmental cock-up on our hands. And I suspect we ain’t seen nothing yet.

I can say this with some confidence since I actually live in Cottonera. I consider it a privilege, what with all the history and waterfront walks and colourful people. Until recently it was also one of the most tranquil places I’d ever known – which, given that I’ve lived in the centre of Cambridge and an old town in Switzerland, is saying something.

The last bit has now changed. The dockyard has remembered what a ship looks like and the results are pretty dire. It’s not just the grit blasting. It’s the constant hum that comes from the place day and night, the bright lights, the metallic clangs, and such. Grit blasting is in fact the merest cherry on the icing.

The mad thing is that I live rather far away from the yard, about 0.8km as the crow flies. I can’t begin to imagine what it must be like for the hundreds of people in Cospicua and Senglea whose houses are within a stone’s throw of the docks. But it doesn’t stop there.

Let’s be generous and assume I live at the outermost limit of the nuisance. Taking the 0.8km as the radius of a circle seems a fair thing to do, since dust and sound and light travel in all directions.

This effectively means that the dockyard is polluting and being a daily and nightly pain to the residents of most of Senglea and Cospicua, a good chunk of Vittoriosa, and significant parts of Valletta and Fgura.

I’ve checked my facts. A resident of Fgura told me she used to get up and check the taps at night, since the sound reminded her of running water. And grit blasting can be heard across the water by people living in the Santa Barbara bastion area of Valletta.

The conclusion is shocking. Whichever way you look at it, the dockyard is causing significant deterioration in the quality of life of some thousands of residents of the harbour area, with several hundred being particularly badly hit.

This is not a necessary evil. There is nothing ‘necessary’ about having a dockyard, in spite of all the ‘omm is-snajja’ (‘the mother of all trades’) rhetoric. Nor does the ‘it has always been there’ argument hold, especially not when government had such a great opportunity to clear the whole mess once and for all.

Rather, what’s happening in Cottonera and beyond is the direct result of bad planning and pig-headed politics. The dockyard should never have been given this new lease on life. It should have been shut down and the place – which would have been prime real estate, among other things – used for some other purpose.

Apart from the obvious, there are at least three reasons why a dockyard bang in the middle of residential and recreational space in one of Malta’s most beautiful spots makes as much sense as installing a petroleum refinery in your bedroom. All three have to do with continuity, or rather the lack of it.

The first shift concerns the way locals perceive the place. Until fairly recently, the yard was embedded in their everyday lives. The livelihoods of a great many Cottonera families depended directly on it, and there was a certain strange conviviality between industrial and residential space.

Of course, no one enjoyed grit blasting even back then, but the feeling that the yard was something organic, something home-grown to which people belonged directly, went a long way towards harmony.

That historical thread of continuity and belonging has now been broken. For a number of reasons, locals no longer feel that the yard is essential or tolerable. No matter how many tens of thousands of euros Palumbo donates to the Community Chest Fund, the significance of it-tarzna as ‘one of us’ has flown.

Secondly, recent years have seen a sea change in people’s sensitivities to environmental issues in general. Thirty years ago, grit and noise were thought of as inconveniences and pollution was hardly thought about at all.

They were disliked as we dislike heatwaves, for example, or irritating people. A dockyard in Cottonera probably seemed like a good idea – for one, you didn’t have to commute very far. Such attitudes are now unrecognisable.

But there’s a third reason why the Palumbo contract is a qassata that makes Alfred Sant’s efforts look like homebaking.

It’s called the ‘regeneration of Cottonera’ and is there all over the publicity leaflets and plaques and speeches. It’s also present in the flesh. It would be both silly and unfair to say that nothing has been done to make Cottonera a nicer and smarter place.

That’s exactly why it doesn’t make sense to keep playing the tarzna tune. Even as the government was busy reviving the yard, it was in the middle of a planning process for the regeneration of the Dock 1 area in Cospicua, literally metres away from the grit and clangs.

I suspect this ‘regenerated’ real estate is now going to be worth about as much as a dead cat. As for the new hotel being built on the Vittoriosa waterfront, I can only hope dust masks will be issued at reception as standard procedure.

We’re looking at a textbook case of an industry that would never have made it through even the most cavalier of environment impact assessments, and yet has been resuscitated in a display of misguided political virtuosity. It’s a bit like developing sophisticated science to bring T-Rex back from the dead.

Do I blame Palumbo? Not at all. Palumbo was sold a dockyard and it’s only logical that it might attempt to make it work as such. The blame this time lies squarely on government’s shoulders for having gone for easy solutions and political expediency and dumped good planning sense at the bottom of a creek.

mafalzon@hotmail.com