The ineptitude shown during Mepa’s board meeting on Thursday that approved, amid uproar, the Marsascala waste management plant was the last episode, and certainly the most trenchant symbol, of the gross ineptitude shown by the government in the whole business.

Consider the date chosen for the final board meeting – during the busiest days of the year, when everyone is engaged in the many Christmas parties and in Christmas shopping – sandwiched in between two more applications, with a restricted time for discussion.

The law states that all those who have registered their opposition to an application must be admitted to the hearing, but so many had objected that more than half of them were kept out in the cold winter morning.

Those who made it inside did not fare any better, and they included seven mayors and at least three MPs, and they were all treated, by the chairman and by the police, as if they were rabble-rousers.

When they started to object that a crucial document, the DPA report, had been placed for public view just two days before, at night, and that no one could be expected to study it in such a short space of time, they were over-ruled as if the mere fact of placing a document on the website satisfies the requirement of full transparency.

More was to come: when the time came for reaching a decision, the Mepa board, which had previously endured the shouting and sometimes outrageous comments directed at them by staring straight ahead and stolidly enduring all, showed their collective ineptitude by not asking even one question – any question. Then, when the time came, they sheepishly raised their hands and the deed was done.

It is a sorry ending to a sorry story. It may well have been quite the wrong decision taken by the Labour government (and implemented by the PN government) to set up the waste treatment plant on the floor of the valley just outside Marsascala in the 1980s, for the simple yet wrong reason that there was a rubbish tip there already. That was when Marsascala was not yet as over-populated as it is now and when the plant was surrounded by fields. A government by the people for the people would have prided itself in removing the nuisance.

Instead, by some pig-headedness on the part of the decision-takers, the decision must have been taken at an early stage to pull down the existing facility and build another one on the same site.

Given that this will be a closed facility, and that modern technology will ensure a far cleaner operation, how can the people of Marsascala be persuaded that what went wrong before will not go wrong again? They have only to look around them and they see more than enough evidence of government’s non-caring attitude – in such instances as unmade roads and closed police stations, etc – for it to appear that their locality, as with much of the south, and Marsa as well, seems to have been selected for the dumping of Malta’s waste.

Consider the cumulative effect, not just the single waste facility: the incomplete promenade, the still not effected upgrading of St Thomas Bay, the planned concentration of tuna farms just outside the bay, the drainage outfall just around the corner at Xghajra, the derelict former national swimming pool, etc.

What important principle would have been infringed, had the Mepa board postponed its decision until all concerned had had time to consult the document?

Or if a proper place had been chosen for such a meeting? Or if prior agreement had been reached with the people attending the meeting regarding the way it was to be conducted?

And what Brownie points would the government have lost if it had agreed (or agrees, even at this late stage) to try and move the whole thing outside the Marsascala area?

Let the government not hide behind the specious question: where would people have it sited?

One final comment in respect of the whole technological aspect: it may be that the uproar did not allow anyone to follow the case officer’s report on such things as state-of-the-art technology, a description of the technology to be used, examples from other countries, guarantees that were to be demanded from the developer, etc., but one would have expected a far weightier presentation than one from just the case officer. As far as anyone knows, the case officer is not an expert in the technology of waste management or in health matters.

But then what do you expect when this is, after all, a government body sitting in judgement on an application submitted by the government in office and one, to boot, to which the government in office has nailed its reputation?