That was the easy part

The challenges facing the new transport minister are significant. Amid recent cries for safer roads, and accident- prompted congestion, it is pretty clear that the current situation is not working or at least working as well as it should.

Building wider faster roads, in a country where enforcement, for whatever reason, is problematic, was never going to make them safer. But road safety is not the only challenge left by the outgoing team.

Making roads wider, and faster, up to the point where they single down again, has encouraged more people to drive and drive on their own. The promise that they would result in less people driving has been shown to be untrue.

Building faster wider roads was the easy bit, encouraging people not to drive is the monster challenge facing the new minister and I don’t envy him one bit. Our long-term plan is a metro that might possibly never get built and what do we do in the intervening 10 to 15 years?

Meanwhile, back in the real world, work that could have really helped reduce some car use, such as the National Parking Policy, the National Cycling Policy and the National Cycling Infrastructural Guidelines, are either in a dusty drawer somewhere or jammed up in the system, long overdue. Transport minister,  please note.

If main road upgrades were supposed to solve everything, why do we keep turning back roads into high-speed one-way streets that are no longer bike- friendly? In extreme cases, we have removed cycle lanes, like in St Andrews or Żebbuġ, with very shaky and dubious alternatives.

We need to stop building cosmetic green footpaths of dubious standards that don’t connect anywhere. Attard is a prime example and Santa Luċija’s new green lane doesn’t even connect to the road junctions it passes.

Our alternative transport network, even the new part, needs a complete review based upon functionality. Like I said, the challenges are daunting.

JAMES WIGHTMAN –St Julian’s

Hydrogen hopes

I heartily thank engineer Stephen Sammut for his very interesting and instructive article on ‘Research on use of hydrogen to fuel Malta’s transportation’ (April 10). But it has made me ever more impatient for the upgrading of our power station to hydrogen fuel.

Our electricity is as clean or dirty as the power station that generates it. You think you are driving a 100-per-cent electric car when, in reality, your ‘clean electricity’ is using the polluting energy of the plant from which it is coming.

This does not mean we have to wait till our power plant is fully upgraded to zero pollution to start investing in green assets. It is true that your electric whatever is as green or brown as the station which is generating its power, yet it is easier to control the pollution of a single power plant than that caused by thousands of machines all over the island.

The hydrogen solution envisioned by Sammut need not depend on the power station. As he tells us, hydrogen can be produced at every distributing pump. The electricity needed for that could be derived from solar panels (and wind turbines?).

Being given so much hope of a hydrogen solution and subject to correction, I propose  adding locally made green hydrogen to the natural gas of our power station to make it less polluting (if this is not already being done).

ALBERT SAID – Naxxar

Keeping the Bibliotheca open during the French period

Document AOM 6523E f.86 et featuring in French the last paragraph of the first page and the first of the second page, reporting the government’s gratitude shown to librarian Citizen Navarro for keeping the Bibliotheca open. PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE PUBLIC LIBRARY, VALLETTA

For the sake of clarity, allow me to respond to two readers who reacted to my April 3 feature about 1,000 years of Franco-Maltese connections on April 10.  

Limited for space in such published features, I am sure reader Charles A. Gauci understands that my list of French citizens of Maltese descent who made a name in various fields in France had to be restricted. In literature and the arts, I only mentioned Fernand Gregh, when others like Laurent Ropa equally deserve appreciation.

In the political field no doubt, Marine Le Pen, especially after last Sunday’s showing in the presidential elections, is certainly one prominent French lady with Maltese ancestry. Alas, besides her, I also left out a French actor, TV and cinema producer, naturalised Italian star of several sexy comedies all’italiana, Edwige Fenech, who was born in French Algeria of a Maltese father in 1948. 

Reader Thomas Zerafa, on the other hand, wrote about the Bibliotheca, founded by French knight de Tencin in 1766, now housed in the present edifice built by French Grandmaster de Rohan in 1796. Zerafa lifted certain details from Carmel Testa’s research, while ignoring others, in the process obscuring the positive contribution credited to the Franco-Maltese government of 1798-1800. He concluded that it was under the British that the Bibliotheca ‘could start’ as a public library, in 1811.

In history, passive neglect or omission produces distorted or manipulated narratives.

If it were not for General Napoleon Bonaparte’s insightful refusal in 1798 to permit Grand Master Ferdinand von Hompesch to take the Order’s archives with him, the Bibliotheca in Valletta today would not possess the priceless collection of manuscripts and volumes of the Knights of Malta.

Zerafa builds his disputation around de Regnaud’s inconsiderate intention to use certain papers from the Bibliotheca for cartridges, which,  in any case, never materialised. He omits to mention other relevant commands, which on the contrary show the appropriate concern the Bonapartist Franco-Maltese Commission had for the preservation of all types of archives.

On June 15, 1798, the Commission of Government approved the employment of an assistant guardian to his father, Citizen Bonnet at the public library, after a request by the librarian, Citizen Navarro. On August 28, another order approved the moving of the library to its proper premises ‘without delay’.

Two years later, on June 4, 1800 – most of the intervening time was spent behind the bastions of la Cité de Malte (that is Valletta, Cottonera, Floriana and Manoel Island) – the commission highly praised Citizen Navarro for his diligent work at the public library.

Though Testa’s volume is written from an anti-French standpoint, it correctly records that the commission “declared its appreciation of Navarro, in charge of the Public Library, who had managed to keep that institution open for many months without any financial help”. To keep the public library functioning, Navarro was selling some recently minted gold and silver medals, which were of least value “to defray part of the daily expenses”.

For the readers’ benefit, I am reproducing the existing relevant document from the Bibliotheca.

CHARLES XUEREB – Sliema

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