I spend part of my year in Malta, and follow matters here with a keen interest. However, there are some things I cannot understand, and one of these is the importance given to the gutter writings of your columnist Daphne Caruana Galizia. Instead of using her role constructively, Mrs Caruana Galizia degrades your newspaper by using (or abusing) it as a weapon to lash out at her enemies. 

I will not join your country's political fray, though even I can see that her animosity towards the Labour Party borders on the obsessional. However, I follow environmental matters enough to know that her attacks on people like Astrid Vella are unjustified and unacceptable. I do not know Mrs Vella personally, but I have followed her writings and I have found them to be sound, well-researched and politically independent. This has also been stated by none other than the local Developers' Association chairman Michael Falzon.

Mrs Caruana Galizia’s constant claim that Mrs Vella contributed to the recent Nationalist defeat at the polls is ridiculous. Even I can tell that Mrs Vella’s group was far more outspoken when George Pullicino was your Environment Minister before 2008, and that time the Nationalist Party won the election. So it is ludicrous to claim that the FAA’s more low-key approach this time around contributed to the defeat of the Nationalist Party, which needed no help to lose the election.

Another accusation is that environmentalists are holding back progress in Malta. Such a claim is ignorant in the extreme, as it is Malta's over-development, gridlock and air pollution that are hallmarks of a third-world country. The environmental measures that Mrs Vella proposes were considered mainstream decades ago in northern Europe; far from being backward, the environmentalists are trying to drag Malta into the future.

Mrs Caruana Galizia is part of that class of people that I come across in Malta who think they know everything when, in reality, they know very little and put party politics ahead of the national interest – a syndrome that has held back Malta’s governance and progress.

However, Mrs Caruana Galizia’s malicious pen sinks to new lows in saying that Mrs Vella did not deserve the Gieh ir-Republika honour. Mrs Vella’s dedication to the cause of heritage and the environment is widely known and appreciated. Why should she have refused the honour when it gives importance to the environmental cause and added clout to her message?

I submit that Mrs Caruana Galizia’s crusade is based on nothing more than malicious jealousy, and I am surprised that a serious newspaper like yours allows such gutter journalism, especially when it must be aware of the great many people who refuse to buy this paper because of her writings.

Christian Olsen

DENMARK