The subject of the undersea Malta-Gozo tunnel was brought back to the surface on Thursday by Prime Minister Joseph Muscat when he addressed a public consultation meeting in Gozo, with the Cittadella serving as his backdrop.
"This government is committed to deliver on the tunnel promise," he said. But (and there is always a but) the project "will take time as lots of studies need to be carried out first."
The first question that springs to mind is why the numerous studies the Prime Minister mentions studies have not yet been carried out. Yes, the government has commissioned seismic and geological studies, but it has not yet commissioned equally important studies on, say, the impact that a tunnel (or a bridge, for that matter) would have on traffic in Gozo. Have we actually figured out if Gozo's charm, its main selling point at least from the touristic point of view, will be lost forever if we dig and drive our way to the sister island? Should we not consider this before rushing into geological studies and declaring that the project is doable and that it will be done?
The authorities also need to commission social and economic impact assessments but the instead seem to be merely looking at the matter from a monetary angle, and in so doing they are putting the cart before the horse.
Another burning question is whether such a tunnel is important enough to justify the environmental destruction that its construction would inevitably entail. The Prime Minister warned this week that the tunnel's entry and exit points would not be in Cirkewwa and Mgarr, but that instead they would most probably be located near Xemxija on the Malta side and further inland from Mgarr in Gozo. This would most likely necessitate the taking up of yet more of the country's precious countryside and replacing it with still more concrete.
But, on other hand, the plight of the thousands of Gozitans who work in Malta and have to wake up every day at hours unimaginable to many in order to catch the ferry is understandable. A solution needs to be found for these people, seeing that successive governments have failed miserably on their promises to create jobs for Gozitans in Gozo itself. But any such solution needs to address the problem without creating other larger ones.
Apart from the bridge/tunnel concept, there have been other proposals that could have made Gozitans' lives easier but, so far, none have materialised. These included an air link, and a fast ferry service, which, we have now been told, should start in 2018.
Many believe that the Malta-Gozo link will never come to fruition, and that it is nothing more than a political ploy to win the hearts, and votes, of Gozitans. The last Nationalist administration had used that trick (unsuccessfully), and so did Labour. But after winning the majority in Gozo at the last general election polls, the current administration wasted two years studying the bridge option which, 1970s studies had already shown, is not viable. It now seems to be dragging its feet on the studies that need to be carried out on the tunnel project.
Whatever the case, rest assured that the Gozo tunnel will feature in both the PL and the PN's 2018 electoral programmes. Gozo will once again be a major prize that both parties will seek to claim, and the tunnel carrot will inevitably be dangled enticingly before the Gozitan electorate, irrespective of whether either party actually intends going through with the project or not.