The Planning Authority’s approval of a development overlooking the Simar nature reserve run by Birdlife Malta is outrageous.

The Simar reserve is a magical place where children and adults can have extraordinary experiences observing wildlife. It plays an important educational role for Malta’s next generation as well as being of huge importance ornithologically. Now, the entire site and all the hard work of Birdlife Malta is under threat.

I call on the Times of Malta to individually name and shame the developer, the architect and the PA members responsible for this latest desecration.

What on earth do these people tell their children? That greed is more important than protecting and nurturing Malta’s fragile natural environment? That lining one’s own pockets is more important than respecting the pan-European interest in the birds migrating through the Simar reserve and the rights of the birds themselves to smooth passage?

It is tempting to conclude that there is more moral compass in the little finger of the average Birdlife Malta activist than in the entire PA body.

In a remarkably short time, ‘Malta’ and ‘corruption’ have become synonymous across the world, in finance, in politics and environmental protection. In the UK, the more than one million members of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds read regularly about how protected species of bird are shot with impunity across these islands. A call by the RSPB for their members to boycott visits to Malta might serve as the loud wake-up call to these vandals, since nothing else seems to get through to them.

There are crooks everywhere. Even the birds of the air are now under serious threat from the rapacity of developers and their PA cronies.