Letters to the editor - July 15, 2026

Political watchdog

Michael Vella of Sliema writes:

During this past electoral campaign, Labour propaganda was proposing solutions to the many problems facing the Maltese people. Now that we have a new cabinet of so many ministers, lots of the solutions seem to being swept once again under the carpet.

Youths jeering and throwing bottles and cans onto the street below in Swieqi.

Residents in Swieqi are still experiencing vandalism and rowdiness in their district, Mellieħa residents enduring sleepless nights because of the floating disco island in their bays with loud music bleating out till early hours.

Police enforcement regarding fines on the spot for tourists who mock our laws and culture, which were supposed to come into force on June 1, seem to be just a note on paper and forgotten. No news at all about police stations being reopened in our villages.

Traffic problems remain on the shelf, we hear no news about tackling overpopulation as this now seems to be the government policy irrespective of the many headaches it is causing.

What is the use of taking people for a ride by playing musical chairs where ministries are involved when, after all, government policy is the same as before the election? The Maltese voter blindly fell for it.

Transatlantic objectives

Peter Dingli of San Diego, California writes:

Charles Gauci’s recent comment, urging me to “have a look in my own backyard” (July 4), is quite right when he says that he has no wish to engage in polemics. To do so would require an argument, whereas he has managed only a retreat into legalistic fatalism and a rather clumsy attempt at geographical gatekeeping.

His first defence is to hide behind the apron strings of the Maltese constitution. To argue that Roman Catholicism must be taught in state schools simply because article 2 says so is to mistake a description for a justification. It is the classic fallacy of the bureaucrat: it is the law because it is the law.

Constitutions are not holy writ, though Gauci seems to have a habit of confusing the two. They are living documents meant to protect the rights of citizens, not to provide a permanent state subsidy for the psychological conscription of children into sectarian dogma.

But it is his second point, if one can call it that, where he truly flounders.

Gauci attempts a bit of cheap, transatlantic tu quoque, suggesting that, because I currently reside in the United States, I have forfeited my right to comment on Maltese affairs and should, instead, focus on the creationist absurdities of the American education system. How charmingly parochial.  Let me disabuse Gauci of his assumptions.

First, as a proud citizen of Malta, my right to comment on the civic and intellectual future of my homeland is absolute, unalienable and entirely independent of my current postcode. Dual citizenship does not contract the mind; it expands the horizon. It does not disqualify one from the conversation; it provides a vantage point from which to view it.

Second, he assumes I am a passive observer of the American landscape. I can assure him that I spend no shortage of energy resisting the very same forces of religious obscurantism, young-earth creationism and clerical overreach here in the United States that he seeks to coddle in Malta.

The battle against superstition and the defence of the secular classroom is not a local squabble bounded by national frontiers. It is a universal struggle. The effort to rescue children from the clutches of mutually exclusive “cosmos-management cartels” is just as urgent in San Diego as it is in Valletta.

To suggest that one must fix every crack in the American foundation before pointing out that the Maltese house is being undermined by clerical privilege is a transparently lazy deflection. The fight for critical thought, scientific literacy and an education free from tribal mythologies belongs to everyone, everywhere. I shall continue to wage it on both sides of the Atlantic, whether Gauci finds it convenient or not.