If you’ve ever replaced a kitchen or bathroom or added a lick of paint to the living room you’ll know that home improvements are not for the faint- hearted.  Even when the painter, plumber or carpenter happens to be your spouse or a trusted friend, the process is never trouble-free. DIY or professional, freely chosen or forced, ‘grand designs’ are always stressful and invasive.   

And when it’s your neighbour’s grand design the situation is all the more stressful. OK, occasional renovations are fine, and it would be unreasonable to expect otherwise, but a self-confessed home-body like me (long before lockdown) resents the very idea of neighbouring construction work that makes your life a living, decibel hell.  

Extensive and prolonged excavation and other works are appalling game-changers. Dust, debris, noise and noxiousness suddenly get in the way of daily life. Quite literally, it is the same drill every day which is now living inside your head; while outside builders’ vans block your garage, and the street you once loved, is trashed. Worse still, your home and ultimate refuge is suddenly where you don’t want to be.  

I have in the past, on numerous occasions, extended my deepest sympathies to people whose lives have been destroyed by noise.  

Those uncomplaining and unconsidered people who have suffered appalling intrusion and even nervous breakdown. 

Home comes first, but I must confess I feel much the same about public places whose raison d’être is mutual enjoyment. They should remain neutral and not be appropriated by selfish interests. Why should I be made to suffer someone else’s bad taste in (loud) music on a beach which is also there for my enjoyment and relaxation? 

Hence why home should be your castle that exists for your refuge, shelter and protection. There’s even a proverb about it.  Centuries ago, uninvited invasion was against the common law. And by extension (in the US anyway) ‘castle doctrine’ empowers the use of deadly force as a means of self-defence.  

Sadly, such rights to privacy and self-preservation all too often exist only in theory. When Miriam Pace lost her life in early March this year, apart from shock and profound sadness, I was outraged at all those who, directly or indirectly, had permitted and enabled such a thing to happen.  And, we all know, ‘permit’ (noun) is really the issue here. But there are other issues. 

Likewise, in April 2000, Rita Vella, a mother and grandmother who had just sat down to lunch with her family, was killed when she too was buried under the rubble of her own home. That’s the irreplaceable loss of two women, the wives, mothers and grandmothers of ‘other people’. And two families’ childhood homes blitzed for good measure. A disgraced monument to the negligence and insouciance so often associated with excavation in this country.   

Perhaps you are reading this and thinking that two deaths in 20 years are statistically ‘acceptable’. But we all know of other collapses, not necessarily fatal but still utterly horrific and life-changing. And suddenly, sickeningly real, you find yourself playing the childhood game of what three things you’d save in a fire.  

You grab the dog, your husband and small child (not necessarily in that order) and, pregnant with your second child, you make a run for it. Such was the fate of a Guardamangia family in 2019, and I can remember at the time thinking how fortunate Joseph Muscat and his government were in not having to lead the country in an act of collective mourning. He should have given thanks and left well alone. Instead, he chose to call it an ‘accident’ which should not define the construction industry. Famous last words.  

A few months later a four-storey building collapsed in Mellieħa.  Months later, an elderly woman trapped inside, died. Whether of broken bones or a broken heart was neither the government’s nor the contractor’s concern.   

The moral of the story is that losing your home (or your life) in such circumstances is a thing no one should face. ‘Accidents’ like these do not occur out of the blue: they are the consequence of endless, dawn-to-dusk noise and all-pervading dust. Then, one fine day, you notice the cracks and the real worry begins (as if frustration and incipient health issues were trifling). Last scene of all is the day your mother is killed inside her own home.

Extensive and prolonged excavation and other works are appalling game-changers- Michela Spiteri

Here of course you’d expect the state finally to come to the rescue. But even now the onus is on you. Once homely, now homeless, you are left alone to deal with a system that never once consulted you or sought your consent.

You deal also with the police, the architect and ‘health and safety’. And when even the courts seem to be largely indifferent, you know that it’s high time to engage a good lawyer. The fact that you may not have the time, energy, inclination or financial means to do so is precisely why the system will always favour the other side. 

I have written about this countless times. It is totally unacceptable that innocent parties should have to jump through hoops and go to great expense to protect something that has been taken away from them so cruelly and unjustly. The ball is always in the injured party’s court and there is no official body to fight his or her corner. This has got to change. 

And not for the worse. The Malta Developers’ Association recently declared that a bonfire of red-tape is needed to give the economy the coronavirus kick-start it ‘deserves’. Personally, I’d rather remind this self-interested pressure group that it was a sanctioning of short-cuts and shoddiness that killed Miriam Pace and Rita Vella. If this pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that following the rules and not taking chances pays the best dividends. Malta is a great little country when it takes enforcement seriously.