I write in reaction to the personal opinion – I presume – expressed by Astrid Vella entitled Gozo bridge (TMIS 20 October). Mrs Vella, the founder and director of Flimkien Ghal Ambjent Ahjar, seems to be well-off and wants to continue relishing her main residence in cosmopolitan Sliema and be able to retire to recoup some peace and quiet in Xewkija at her leisure. Not so the Gozitans who, of necessity, have to go to Malta, or the Maltese who likewise have to cross over to Gozo. The fact that the recent survey was conducted on a small sample does not in any way detract from its scientific basis, as any student of statistics can tell Mrs Vella.

Elsewhere in the local press, a financial intermediary has stated that a conservative estimate places the amount of money lost by Maltese (including Gozitans) in foreign sham investments at half a billion euros. How many new jobs and wealth would have been created had such funds been invested – even if it is what Mrs Vella and her ilk term a white elephant – in a permanent link between Malta and Gozo?

Likewise, from which Church document does the local curia nestled environment commission get its mandate to pontificate on such a political issue as the construction of a permanent link between the islands? Perhaps its members are totally in the dark about what the late, much loved, Gozo Bishop Cauchi wrote on the need for Gozo not to be relegated to the status of a dormitory community.

However, I have my own thesis to propose and that is that instead of a tunnel or bridge, why not copy what nature millennia ago had in the middle of the Mediterranean? This is to construct a land bridge between Malta, Comino and Gozo with much narrower channels between the islands and the construction of smaller bridges that can be raised at designated times, if required, to allow the passage of yachts or boats. Such a project would create hundreds, if not thousands of construction jobs, without the need to continue ruining our countryside and village cores, and give our densely populated small country some extra square kilometres of land: an idea I would think Mrs Vella should welcome. Far-fetched? But I thought that is what “innovation” and “thinking outside the box” is all about. Naturally as I have not been given a lucrative “consultancy”, this idea may remain just that – dead on paper.

C. Debono

GHAJNSIELEM