Here’s an update on the Construction Chaos currently taking place while people are suffering from election and news fatigue.
A permit for the construction of four villas was granted in an ODZ area in Kalkara.
A hotel behemoth with 104 bedrooms will take the place of an existing two-storey house in Lourdes Lane in Swieqi. This is in an area designated as a ‘residential buffer zone’ but will now become an extension of Paceville.
Just before that, the Planning Authority approved an application for a five-storey development in Pembroke, which is made up of pleasant wide roads and two-storey houses. Two hundred residents objected. The members of the board that approved this did not even make eye contact with any of them.
Just outside Naxxar, one of the two applications for old people’s homes in an ODZ area is soon to be considered. There are another four homes in the pipeline – in different parts of the island – and all outside the development zone. Notice has been given that an application for a hotel has been filed on the beautiful and – till now – unspoilt Delimara beach.
I live in Sliema, where the chaos has become all-out mayhem as the cranes, the construction dust, the dirt and the noise have become the norm in an everyday assault on tranquility and wellbeing. I have become immune to those who dismiss the town as being a lost cause and who tell residents that if they don’t like it they should up and leave. But I can never reconcile myself to the way that the unbridled chaos which has been visited on Sliema is being allowed to spread everywhere.
I can never reconcile myself to the way that the unbridled chaos which has been visited on Sliema is being allowed to spread everywhere
Minor developments, major developments in all parts of the island – nowhere is spared. It is a tsunami of unplanned, unharmonious, impractical building. The architects who are in any way contributing to this and the people who are complicit in the granting of permission to such hideousness are responsible for this. Every time I come across them uttering specious arguments before some permit-dispensing board, my stomach churns and I want to step away from them in the same way one would step away from a steaming dog turd.
■ In the immediate aftermath of a general election, it’s all post-mortems and soul-searching and rebuilding and seeing who the next political players are going to be. The emphasis is on the personalities involved in the political game. Very little attention, if any, is given to assessing the impact and consequences of the electoral promises made in the past. Which is a pity, as millions of euros are being funnelled towards projects of arguably little benefit.
Take the tablet per child proposal for instance, the one dangled before the last election but one. There was the usual pre-electoral bonanza going on and some bright spark in either the Labour or the Nationalist Party thought the tablet proposal would go down terrifically well with parents whose mobile phones was constantly being nabbed by their children to play Angry Birds on. This gadget proposal was dressed up in the usual way. The politicians couldn’t exactly say that they were lobbing some gizmos our way so we would vote for them. Instead the tablets became “state-of-the-art essential tools” for bridging the digital divide, helping our children brave new technological frontiers. That was the marketing-speak.
Two or three years down the line I wish we could have an audit as to the costs and resultant benefits of the great tablet giveaway. How much money was spent on the tablets themselves, and on the software, programming and maintenance? And were the programmes and materials uploaded on the tablets of superior educational quality? Did they replace any books or workbooks, relieving children of back-breaking schoolbags?
I rather think that if we had to have a proper cost-benefit analysis, we would find that a lot was spent with minimal benefits just to find a way to implement this pre-electoral promise. It would have been far better to increase teachers’ pay, making it more commensurate with their wide-ranging responsibilities. That’s the way to add prestige to the profession and to attract more people to its ranks. As it is, careers in the gaming industry offer better salaries for less grief. And we go and spend tonnes of money on digital distraction instead of the professionals who will be guiding our children through their crucial years.
drcbonello@gmail.com