French politicians with Maltese connections

I refer to Charles Xuereb’s most interesting article ‘Celebrating 1,000 years of Franco-Maltese connections’, (April 3).

I am slightly puzzled by the fact that when mentioning French politicians with Maltese connections, Xuereb failed to mention Marine Le Pen, president of the Rassemblement National and a candidate in the upcoming French presidential elections.

Marine’s ancestor, Marie Micallef (1868-1930), a Maltese lady from Alexandria in Egypt and a descendant of one of my own forebears, Vincenzo Cutajar, married a Frenchman, George Vincent.

Their daughter, Pauline, settled in France and the latter’s granddaughter, Pierrette La Lanne, married Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, another prominent French politician and Marine’s predecessor as president of the Rassemblement National. We Maltese are certainly an eclectic bunch!

Charles A. Gauci – Sannat

The Bibliotheca

Further to last Sunday’s contribution by historiographer Charles Xuereb regarding the building of the national library, the Bibliotheca, completed in 1796, under Grand Master Emmanuel de Rohan, readers will be surprised to learn that it would take 16 years for the Bibliotheca to come in full use.

In June 1798, when Napoleon Bonaparte took over Malta, he appointed the notorious Regnaud de Saint-Jean d’Angely as commissioner. At the time, the Bibliotheca was still empty. According to Carmel Testa, author of The French in Malta, on July 15, 1798, d’Angely ordered the destruction of the great quantity of documents belonging to the Order of St John, documents of incalculable historical value not only to the Order but also for European history.  

These documents, waiting to be transferred to the new library, according to d’Angely, would at last be used in a useful manner because the artillery general was in need of old paper for cartridges!   

It was therefore ordered that documents with titles of property were to be saved but all the rest of the Order’s archives were to be taken to be made into cartridges.

The Maltese Bruno was appointed for this task. He took great pains to drag his feet as much as possible, hoping for something to happen to save the documents. The rebellion of the countryside saved the documents.

In 1811, Civil Commissioner Hildebrand Oakes ordered that the Bibliotheca could start being used as a public library.

THOMAS ZERAFA – Naxxar 

Why does the EU continue flirting with Russia?

Although war crimes and atrocities committed by Russia in Ukraine are there for everyone to see, the EU has still not sanctioned Russian gas. It is still sending money to Russia to finance this sacrilegious war because it does not want to hurt itself.

Frances Coppola said: “Financial sanctions can break a country’s banking system and destroy its currency, severely damaging its economy and inflicting hardship on its citizens. But financial sanctions can also hurt those who deploy them. And avoiding that pain can render them useless. If the EU really cares about what is taking place, it should be willing to make sacrifices. This procrastination will come back to haunt the EU in the future.”

The same thing is taking place in Malta in another sphere. The natural environment, our urban landscape, our skyline and our villages are being horrendously ravaged by rapid overdevelopment and not one of the two main political parties said something about it during the election campaign.

The reason that this is continuing to take place is that, although people grumble, they are uneasy to vote for the natural environment. It will continue to be an uphill task to defend the natural environment against legal, unsustainable development. Then, when all is spent and laid to waste, we will erect a monument in honour of the natural environment.

JOE PORTELLI – Nadur

All lives matter

By the end of March, we registered 10 deaths on our roads since January 1. If this trend continues, we may end up with between 40 and 60 deaths in one year. Ranked on a statistic of deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, this would mean a rate of between 10 and 15 deaths on a yearly basis.

The average of the world stands at 18 deaths but the average for Europe stands at five. Some countries like Monaco, Denmark and Sweden are at 0 or 1.5 deaths per 100,000 per year. Belgium is at five but Malta would rank with the worst offenders in the entire world, with double or triple the European average this year.

This is the first year after the €400 million waste of EU funds given for new roads. Instead of making roads safer, they have become more dangerous. Instead of making traffic flow better, each accident causes a national gridlock.

What we have is fear of the electorate and of the bullies and car importers who want more roads for more cars and less trees to have wider roads to increase speed.

If I were to be in charge of mobility in Malta, I would have introduced a maximum speed limit of 50km an hour on all major roads and of 20km a hour in built up areas and of 10 in village cores.

I would enforce, with cameras, fines on the spot and licence removals.

I would ban all compression engine cars, trucks, buses and vans and only allow electrical cars with a maximum speed limit engines of 70km, since, sometimes, to avoid an accident, one may have to speed up or overtake in emergencies. I would have no telephones in cars that are moving, whether hands free or not. Technology exists to make this happen.

Malta is so small that if the traffic flows slowly, everybody would get to their destinations on time and safely.

I would ban all vehicles above five tons from the island, whether they transport goods or people, or serve as cranes, lifters or bulldozers. What can be done with one trip should be done with many more with smaller electrical vehicles instead. This would save the road surface and the walls of all our village and pavements cores, which have been massacred by the large heavy-duty second-hand imports that spew exhaust and make noise from morning to night.

This would increase the cost of building, demolishing and goods transport, which is a good thing because it would reduce the unnecessary and uneconomical construction projects of today. It would create more jobs for careful drivers of smaller vehicles. Less construction would also reduce the imported labour into Malta by people traffickers during the past 10 years. Another positive side effect. 

This can be done over a period of eight years, instead of spending all that money on flyovers, fly-unders and fly-in-betweens that look ghastly and spoil our island. They have been a waste of money and only help lovers of speed.

Luckily, the former minister for roads has been promoted as is normally done to a level above his capacity and will now destroy our foreign relations as he has destroyed our road surfaces.

Let us see what will happen at the first international thunderstorm that he will face in our name. Will we see flooding and chaos as we have seen on our roads?

JOHN VASSALLO – St Julian’s

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