We have been here before.

In the late 1950s, when the authorities were trying to kick-start Malta’s still unexplored tourism potential, some British entrepreneurs came up with the idea of opening a casino and, predictably, all hell broke loose.

In Dom Mintoff’s 1955–1958 administration, the idea was put forward by Mr Mintoff’s advisers, Thomas Balogh and Dudley Sears, but it met the implacable opposition of Archbishop Gonzi who saw it as a threat to public morality.

A year later, in 1959, when Malta was once again under direct colonial rule, a syndicate that included Baron Jurgen von Richtofen, a German financier, took up the idea once again and proposed to open a kursaal at Dragonara on the lines of the kursaals in Berne and Lucerne.

As Professor J. M. Pirotta tells it, they had the good sense to get the archbishop on their side. They organised a meeting with the archbishop, who came with two monsignori in tow, and drew up a list of conditions, including one that gave the archbishop the right to go and check if the conditions still held.

The rest is history.

What may have looked at that time as indispensable for Malta’s tourism offer, turned out to be not so important at all. In the end, what made Malta a tourist destination was the availability of bed stock, better connections and the right publicity abroad. As for the casino, it attracted the Maltese but only a very small trickle of tourists can be said to have come to Malta because of its casino. It is only fair to point out however that it has since become totally integrated into the gamut of holiday attractions in Malta.

It can be argued that the idée fixee that Malta needs golf courses is as absurd as the 1959 idea that unless Malta had a casino it could not begin to attract visitors.

One would have thought that trying to attract golf tourism to Malta was like selling coals to Newcastle. Why would people who can go to Scotland for the St Andrews’s golf courses, or to the Algarve in Portugal, or to Austria etc, come to Malta to play golf? Why come here for a choice of between two, or three, golf courses when they can choose from five or 10 all within an hour’s drive? The figure of an additional 30,000 tourists coming here for golf has been mentioned. As far as is known nothing has been produced to substantiate this claim.

On the other hand, most of the arguments now being advanced in opposition to the proposed Xaghra l-Hamra golf course appear to take the fundamentalist approach similar to Archbishop Gonzi’s opposition to the casino for moral reasons. It is true that ix-Xaghra l-Hamra is garigue and host to some endemic plants but for many Maltese it is a big stretch of wasteland – used by the army for manoeuvres, by off-roaders, by the people who have something to dump and, until the latest controversy, was hardly known at all by the general public since it is far from the beaten track.

It is also remarkable how the environmentalists – who have now replaced organised religion as the conscience of the nation – tend to oppose each and every idea of anything that can in any way affect the country’s environment, which, given the dimensions of Malta and its density of population, is anything and everything. But they are not right all the time. Consider Portomaso, for instance, and remember the controversies that erupted when the application was being considered – the demonstrations, people lying down in front of bulldozers, etc. Does Portomaso today detract from Malta’s beauty or its tourist offer, or does it, on the contrary, add to both?

At the same time, however, the environmentalists are right on two counts: there is far too much development in Malta that is downright ugly and has had a hugely negative impact on the environment and thus on our health. This does not refer to Maghtab alone, even though Maghtab is a huge collective sin, the mountain we created by dumping all our rubbish there while everybody looked the other way. There is also huge pressure to develop outside the development zone using the flimsiest of excuses. Ras il-Wahx, the long savage coast from Popeye’s Village to Golden Bay, is also one last unspoilt area and ix-Xaghra l-Hamra for all its windswept salty and briny atmosphere which burns off any vegetation – can both be places for rambles and for communing with nature.

The government then is mostly to blame for the current controversy. There was first the confusion created when Mepa suggested three other sites and the government declared this site as the preferred one, which led to so many widespread suspicions. Then there was the crassness of the presidential decrees ordering the farmers, who had been tilling the fields for ages, to move out followed by the damage limitation exercises done by the government: that not all the farmers (or none of the farmers, for even here lines got crossed) will lose ‘their’ land. It would have been far better had the plans been completed first and then presented to all – because so many concerns would have been addressed which are today left hanging creating suspicions.

Ultimately, however, this is once again yet another example of the government rushing to do things when a more reasoned and logical process should have been followed, causing speculation and involving people who may be innocent just because the whole process was never outlined in detail and with enough clarity.

And, as already happened in 1959, it is neither the casino nor the golf course that will strengthen Malta’s tourism sector as much as a sound infrastructure, the right connections (which is where the low cost airlines come in) and ensuring that tourists are not fleeced, that the country is clean, that prices are kept low. While dreaming about golf, the government has lost sight of the ball.