Over the past few days, The Malta Independent has twice reported about the first anniversary of the collapse of a building in Guardamangia. It was on the night of 24 April 2019 that a block of apartments close to St Luke’s Hospital came tumbling down in seconds.

That incident happened to be the first in a series of mishaps which have hit the construction industry in the past year, which has so far ended with the death of a woman when the Hamrun residence she was in gave way beneath her feet in early March. In between the Guardamangia and Hamrun tragedies, there had been others.

The two stories carried by this media house in the past week refer to the fact that, one year after the Guardamangia incident – which had luckily injured no-one, but which had left the residents there homeless – we are nowhere near some kind of closure. The police simply said that investigations are ongoing, the standard reply that is often given by the police in such circumstances, but which always gives the impression that the file is somewhere on a shelf, gathering dust.

In this particular case, no magisterial inquiry had been appointed, which means that the incident falls under the remit of the police. The Malta Independent has been told that no magistrate was appointed to lead an inquiry because no one had been hurt; the thing is, when another building collapsed just two months later, no-one had been injured too, but in that case a magisterial inquiry had been launched. We therefore ask why two similar incidents have been treated differently, and call for more uniformity in the way such occurrences are handled.

No indication has been given as to what stage the police investigations have arrived, which is of little solace to the people involved. The day when these investigations will come to a conclusion, and whether they will lead to any arraignments as happened in the case of the Hamrun tragedy which killed Miriam Pace, is anyone’s guess.

What is ironic is that, next to the now collapsed building in Guardamangia, over the past 12 months a new block has been built. That new building is now erected over the hole which had been excavated adjacent to the block of residences that had collapsed. The Malta Independent has published photos showing how the collapsed remnants of what was once a block of flats now sit desolately next to a fresh looking new building.

While the residents of the apartments that collapsed lost all their possessions, the project to build a new block of flats continued unabated. In the meantime, the homeless residents are still waiting for justice, but at present cannot see any light at the end of the tunnel.

Promises have been made by the government to rein in the excesses of the construction industry, but new regulations that were put in place in June have done little to put people’s minds at rest, in particular those who live near construction and/or excavation sites.

It is clear that the construction industry is too powerful, even for the government. So much so that while all of Malta ground to a halt as measures were introduced to contain the spread of the Coronavirus, construction continued in the past two months or so as if nothing happened.

For too long, the construction industry has been allowed too much leeway. Once the Coronavirus pandemic is over, or even before that, the government must put the need to bring it under control as its top priority.