Qala mayor Paul Buttigieg has spoken of his extreme satisfaction to this afternoon’s tribunal decision to throw out an appeal for a massive development at Ħondoq ir-Rummien, and said that the next step is for the government to expropriate the land and turn it into a national park.

Buttigieg has become a face synonymous with Ħondoq ir-Rummien and the fight to save it from development – a fight which goes back 20 years after a massive yacht marina and tourist village was proposed for the area.

That planning saga came to an end on Thursday, after the Environment and Planning Review Tribunal threw out an appeal filed by the developers behind the plan after the original application was refused by the Planning Authority in 2016.

“I am very satisfied because we’ve achieved what we wanted to achieve.  After I worked for 20 years, finally we have gotten there,” Buttigieg told The Malta Independent soon after the EPRT read out its decision on the appeal.

“It wasn’t easy. For the first four or five years I had people knocking on my door blaming me for their children not having a job because I opposed the development they wanted to do.  Things back then weren’t like today where there aren’t enough workers to fill the jobs there are,” he said.

“Things changed later but people have still done so many things to us behind our backs.  We suffered a lot,” he added.

“I won’t say that I cried, but I almost did,” he says when asked about the emotions he felt when the decision was read out.

“I hugged my wife and said we made it,” he said as he spoke about nights spent pouring over letters and statements to send to newspapers, the time spent attending meetings, and the one time he travelled to Brussels in 2007 to fight the application.

Asked what the next step should be, Buttigieg said that he would be campaigning for the government to expropriate the land like it had done in the 1960s to quarry rocks for the building of the Mgarr breakwater and to turn it into a national park.

Buttigieg has long campaigned not just against the development refused again on Thursday, but to also get the land turned back into an Outside Development Zone.  It was initially zoned as such, with the land being committed for afforestation purposes, but had its status shifted in 2006 when the new local plans earmarked it for possible tourism and marine related developments.

Buttigieg said that the road down to the bay should be widened slightly, and a reservoir to gather water which flows from Qala to the sea so that it can then be used to water the national park itself and for farmers in the area.

However, he said he would “never tolerate” any such water being used to be sold.

Otherwise, he said, it’s a matter of organise things at the bay a bit more.  He mentioned specifically the setting up of a belvedere where people can enjoy the views of Comino in the foreground and Malta in the background.

“And everyone can enjoy it for free. You won’t have to sit on a balcony which you’ve had to pay millions for to enjoy it,” he concluded.