It is a pleasure to see most of the Three Cities area undergoing a gradual transformation as it develops into what many of us have always insisted it should be – a major tourist attraction on the same welcoming platform with Mdina, Valletta, Sliema/St Julian’s, Gozo, and the temples.

It is not a question of some warped idea that is derived from the old North-South syndrome that has even been the subject of a recent Maltese film production. It really is, or should be, the result of an obvious need to show more of the Maltese Islands to both the visitor and the local tourist. And the Cottonera, with its incredible history, its cultural heritage, its traditions and its unique people, certainly deserves the attention it is now being accorded.

I am always careful to underline that the process started years ago, well before the March 2013 general election, when Birgu was slowly being turned into a jewel by a combination of political forces – the strong Labour-run local council led by a dynamic mayor and the then Nationalist government. It was a time when people from all over Malta and Gozo started discovering Birgu as if it were some long-hidden secret one could finally talk about with friends and colleagues.

Sadly that’s where it basically stopped. The whole Cottonera needed that same attention for the area to change and to eventually start generating its own contribution to both the national and local economy. The Dock No.1 project, for example, was designed, politically flaunted and glorified 17 years ahead of the day when the first brick was physically removed from the soot-blackened walls that had for centuries denied the people of Bormla access to the shores that had once been the hub of Malta’s maritime hustle and bustle.

When that solitary brick was finally removed, things turned into a veritable farce as workers and their Italian contractors dug dangerous holes everywhere, caused traffic and parking chaos, and generally created mayhem without even a hint of progress. In people’s minds, the project was like a distant dream they had for so long been told about that they chose to just resort to typical Cottonera banter mixed with feelings of frustration and amusement.

The change of government was the impetus to not only restart and actually complete the Dock No.1 project within a year, but also to bring about the much-desired change in the infrastructure, restoration, preservation, and, no less important, the social well-being of the whole area that also includes Isla and Kalkara. 

We have since seen not just walls being removed, but also palaces, churches, fortifications, ditches, monuments, and other historical places being restored and rehabilitated. Suddenly, the area has witnessed a profusion of new eating places and sundry attractions like museums, exhibitions and watering holes. The transformation goes on as does the change in mentality of the people who live there, the families who sadly still have to fight off the stigma they were and still are burdened with following decades on decades of social neglect and urban decay.

But it is not just the walls that have been imprisoning the people of the Cottonera. For literally centuries, they have been victims of the smells, bells and yells of heavy industry. Countless generations of children have grown up with all types of pollution from ships undergoing repairs inside the docks a balcony’s height from their noses. Many of us who travelled regularly across the streets of the Three Cities remember the black smoke from chimneys infiltrating the very bus we were on. Just imagine what the families had to contend with inside their homes.

Those same families of course also had to endure the noise from squeaking cranes, blasting operations and other work from the adjacent workshops where heavy machines and other plants produced more than an extra decibel.

Of course the old Malta dockyard is no more, but what little is left, now in private hands, is still bound to produce noise pollution. People there know they can hardly do anything about it during the day, but to have to endure it even during the night is certainly not acceptable in this day and age. The previous administration, we now learn, and whose protagonists in Opposition today seem so enamoured of the environment, had overlooked making the issue a condition to the new Italian owners!

So the people of Isla, the hardest hit in the area, rightly went to Court where they barely found any sympathy to their cause. Add to that the nonsensical reaction of some of the odd 100 workers employed at the present yard who went to Castille to protest against the court case which, they said, could jeopardise their livelihood. One could only deduct they couldn’t give one single hoot if people in Isla couldn’t sleep as long as their jobs were not on the line. In contrast, the people of Isla did not, for one single moment, think their protest had anything to do with putting any one’s job at risk. They just needed to sleep and to be able to wake up to go to work every day as fit and as healthy as those who noisily sandblasted the ships around them.

It was good to hear the Prime Minister insisting the issue of jobs should not in any way be brought up by shipyard owners as some form of pressure on the government. If the previous administration was not interested in securing the healthy well-being of the people of the Three Cities, this one certainly is, and a solution to the problem can be reached with neither the residents nor the shipyard workers having to suffer from the horrendous big hole left in the original contract.

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Lady MP with balls

I like it when a politician has a sense of humour, and when a lady MP shows she has balls it gets all the more interesting. This is how I reacted to the news that men in Kentucky, US, could soon have to get a note from their wives before being allowed to purchase Viagra.

Representative Mary Lou Marzian has mounted a light-hearted protest against new abortion restrictions by proposing a new bill. Her action followed Governor Matt Bevin’s signing of a bill forcing women to consult with a doctor at least 24 hours before an abortion – a law she voted against.

Now Ms Marzian has put forward legislation that would force men who want to use erectile dysfunction drugs to jump through several hoops before they are allowed to buy it, and if passed, men would have to visit a doctor twice and then get a note from their wives.

She said: “I want to protect these men from themselves. This is about family values,” adding cheekily that a man requiring the drugs would have to make a sworn statement with his hand on a Bible that he would only use a prescription for a drug for erectile dysfunction when having sexual relations with his current spouse.

The lady’s got balls. I guess what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, no?