The news that government workers are finding it harder than anticipated to clean up the mess created by vandals at the new belvedere above the Blue Grotto can only add to the anger of all civic-conscious people at the attack.

The Malta Independent reported last Tuesday that Resources and Infrastructure Ministry workers have been trying to remove the used oil that was spilled onto a section of the belvedere since the attack took place on 26 March, but the chemicals that have been used so far have not worked.

The costs to restore the belvedere to its original state have therefore escalated – public money that literally goes down the drain when it could be used for other purposes.

There have been quite a number of such vandal attacks over the past months, and in spite of police efforts to catch the perpetrators, so far little success has been achieved. As it has done in the past, this newspaper urges the police to continue giving importance to their investigations into the matter and, once the offenders are caught and proven guilty, the courts of justice should give them an exemplary sentence, if anything to act as a deterrent to others who might be toying with similar intentions.

During March and April alone, vandals have also targeted the Ghadira Nature Reserve, a bus shelter, a farmhouse and a stretch of rubble wall close to the Neolithic temples of Hagar Qim and Mnajdra, limits of Qrendi. Spent oil was also spilled along a rocky beach next to Wignacourt Tower in St Paul’s Bay. Another vandal attack, which took place in January, saw a bring-in site in Qormi being set on fire.

Let us remember that the project at the Blue Grotto has cost the government – and therefore the public – some Lm500,000 to complete, and this had made the Blue Grotto area more attractive to the thousands of tourists and locals who go there.

Why people decide to vandalise public areas for whatever reason is something that cannot be understood, let alone justified. In the past, there have been several attacks, and the disfiguration of the Neolithic temples and Portes des Bombes quickly come to mind as examples of how important monuments have unfortunately been the target of people who should certainly know better.

In the above two cases, measures to increase security – both by physically manning the area better and by the installation of closed circuit cameras – have been taken. Still, the attacks continued.

It is impossible to expect all of Malta and Gozo to be covered by cameras that should keep vandals away. The fact that heritage sites are monitored by cameras will then push vandals to seek other targets that are not supervised, as was the case with the Blue Grotto belvedere.

It is also impossible to expect the police to be present all over the islands at any given time. Police patrols do help to keep potential perpetrators away, but it cannot be expected that the police are everywhere, and there will always be a time when the vandals will be in a position to commit their despicable acts without anyone seeing them.

Yet, this does not mean that the battle is lost. On the contrary, the police should continue to give their best to keep public areas under their scrutiny, while the authorities should also continue to protect such areas against similar attacks in the best possible manner.

For its part, the public should always be prepared to give a lending hand by reporting suspicious behaviour that could lead the police to catch the perpetrators, and it will then be up to the law courts to make sure that sentences given are harsh enough to make people with bad intentions think it over a hundred times before attempting to spoil what should be enjoyed by the rest of the

population.