As I read the ongoing debate (?) about whether or not Malta wants or needs another golf course and wander from one uninformed contention to another it strikes me (OK, a foreigner, a Scot who just happens to come from the country which gave the world golf) just how inane the discussion so far has been… on both sides.

Everybody is rabbiting on about building a golf course on cliffs, or in areas of high wind, and so on and so forth. Nobody, to my knowledge, has mentioned the critical “P” word – profit.

The core issue has nothing to do with whether another golf course can be built on Malta. You can build a golf course pretty well anywhere in the world. All it takes is:

• a lot of space;

• a lot of very specialist land engineering expertise to design and build that space;

• a lot of the right type of soil;

• a lot of the right type of grass and plants;

• lots and lots of water to nurture the above;

• and, above all, a lot of money to finance all of the above.

Since Malta is not exactly overburdened with any of the above commodities, the real issue is whether another golf course should be built at all... whether all of the resources set out above can be bought in from the open, international (and very expensive) market at a level which will still ensure a commercial return on capital.

That’s the rub! And, incidentally, the complete failure of current discussions. Creating a new golf course on Malta will demand massive costs from this island. These costs make no sort of commercial sense at all unless they are based on facts rather more substantial than some sort of vague political, totally unproven, notion that Malta might pick up some more tourists.

Where is the commercial provenance for the claim that another golf course could (maybe) bring another 30,000 tourists to Malta? Where is the business plan to demonstrate that the profit from even 30,000 more tourists will be enough to service the capital debt necessary to provide another golf course, necessary to meet its ongoing maintenance and service costs and provide a commercial return on that capital?

I am not Maltese. I am a foreigner who simply loves this country and, much more importantly its people, enough to have made my home here. I do, however, understand international marketing enough to be deeply concerned about a theoretically commercial project which is apparently now being driven less by hard-headed business acumen than by perceived political prestige.

Malta should beware. It was perceived political prestige that landed this country with a new hospital that is taking so long to build that the junior clerk who drafted the initial specifications will probably be a candidate for its geriatric unit by the time it opens. It was perceived political prestige that ensured when Malta needed office space in Brussels (a city not exactly short of flexible office accommodation). We all know that the building is, as yet, uninhabited.

We all want Malta to succeed. It will succeed... by building on its own strengths.

Wylie Cunningham