When the local plans were published 14 years ago, the lack of public open space was already being noted. Remarking about the Sliema and St Julian’s area, it was observed that “almost a fifth (17 per cent) of the accessible beach between Tigné and Balluta Bay have restricted access to the public.”
That was then. It got much worse since then, with tracts of the beach being taken up by concessions under the guise of providing amenities. But, at least, the private concessions were hogging the land and the sea was considered to be off-limits.
Now the sea at Balluta Bay is under threat as the Captain Morgan group want to operate a tourist ferry from a pontoon in the middle of an official bathing zone.
This means that constant ferry traffic will oust swimmers and divers from the sea when a more suitable site could easily be found in an area which is not a bathing zone. There’s a lot of bluff about this being a vital alternative transport system, but it would be no less so if it had to be sited elsewhere.
What this move boils down to is the takeover of one of the last few public open spaces – the sea – by a private commercial entity for profit. The following extract is from an article about the insidious privatisation of public spaces in London – but it applies equally to Balluta Bay. The bay belongs to all – let’s keep it that way.
It will lead to further landfill extension and make us a country of trash and tunnels
“Public spaces are the organs of a healthy city. In London, this is no luxury. As the rent on our increasingly cramped flats continues to soar, open, accessible, collectively held space becomes even more essential to everyone’s well-being. Public space is also our stage for social and political participation; reducing it to just another real-estate commodity is an attack on our rights to the city and must be resisted by every citizen, every day.”
Some 10 years ago, we already had a system for reporting excessive vehicle emissions. If you caught sight of a car belching out thick, black smoke, you simply had to send a text message to the Malta Transport Authority.
If the same vehicle was reported in three different text messages from three different phones, the authorities would haul in the polluting car owner and have it tested.
Or that’s the way it was supposed to work, anyway. Citizens started texting away trying to fulfil their civic duty to get dirty vehicles off the roads in the hope that there would be some respite.
And then, one fine day in 2009, the Malta Transport Authority admitted it had not tested any cars reported by text message in the preceding year. It had simply ignored all those text messages sent in by concerned citizens and done its own thing, without bothering to communicate this deliberate cock-up to anybody out there.
And just like that, any confidence in the reporting system was completely obliterated. People felt they had been taken for a ride and that they had been fooled into thinking that they were actually being listened to – that they could make a difference.
I, for one, never sent another text message reporting any emissions. I suspected it would be ignored in the same way the others had been.
That sense of betrayal is the one that many people are feeling after getting to know that their carefully separated waste is being mixed in one, big undifferentiated mess at the other end of the waste journey.
It’s not that we haven’t had suspicions after seeing refuse trucks tip grey and black bags into one heap, but now it’s been confirmed.
The irony of it all is that politicians often blame the polluting masses for a host of contraventions. A lack of civic-mindedness and public spirit is cited as the cause for littering and worse.
But, in this case, the public has taken waste separation seriously and run the risk of being fined for minor mistakes such as putting out a wrongly-coloured bag on the wrong day.
Then it turns out that the authorities aren’t sticking to their end of the bargain. It’s a huge let-down and a betrayal. The disillusionment is made worse by the fact that the massive waste build-up and lax (if not non-existent) enforcement of waste reduction policies have led to a situation whereby some 247,000 square metres of agricultural land will now have to make way for a larger landfill.
If the authorities and regulatory agencies continue in the same vein of the past six years, this too will soon be completely full – leading to further landfill extension – and making us a country of trash and tunnels.