The government had kept on dragging its feet about removing the St Luke’s hospital incinerator till the very last day allowed to it by the European Commission, and it was not true the government had planned to eliminate the environmental problems the incinerator had been causing, the MLP said yesterday.

The Labour Party’s spokesmen on the environment, Joe Brincat and Roderick Galdes, said it was the intervention of Labour MEP Joseph Muscat and the Labour Party’s insistence in Brussels which led to immediate action by the EC about the problem. Had it not been for that the government would have continued ignoring the justified complaints of the residents.

The EC, the MLP spokesmen said, had warned the government that if it did not close down the incinerator by 17 December, legal action would be taken against Malta for breaching the waste incineration directive.

In another statement, Dr Brincat and Mr Galdes congratulated Michael Zammit Cutajar for being appointed vice-chairman for 2008 of the negotiation team of the UN convention on climate change.

The appointment, they said, was an honour for Malta and was made against the background of international discussions in Bali aiming to draw up a road map for a global agreement on climate change.