About this matter I've written before and much fear it will remain on the agenda in future, for it's really shameful. A construction project commences in a given street. Till it's finished, a whole pavement is taken over, plus the space for parking alongside.  All this is public space. But have patience, you're told, it's only going to be like so till the project is done...

However, all too often, the project goes on and on; or rather weeks and more go by when nothing happens and still the pavement stays blocked. Passers-by either have to walk down that part of the road which is for driving or they need to cross to the other side.

This is just not right. Whoever starts a project and is creating an inconvenience or worse for others must be prepared to finish it off over a reasonable period of time, otherwise he/she shouldn't even start. Something as reasonable as this apparently is not considered to be normal practice; and not just in Malta. The public is expected to simply bear with the inconveniences created unnecessarily by developers.  It makes sense for the latter to be charged a hefty fee for every day extra such a project goes on beyond the end date stipulated for it.

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MANOEL ISLAND

Frankly, I find less than convincing the government's argument for why it should not arrange that Manoel island gets converted into a green space, instead of letting it be developed according to the wishes of the private entrepreneurs who've made a hash of Tigne. The argument is too legalistic and can be faulted on the same grounds. There exist a number of points where the origiinal Tigne agreement as passed by Parliament was contravened and the government looked away. Yet some were grounds about which its continuation could be greatly questioned.

What should be given more attention are criteria that relate to the general interest. The national transformations that have been happening and for which we still are gearing up (including on the basis of Vision 2050) have affected in an extraordinary way the standing of the project relative to how it was prospected years ago. I well remember what Albert Mizzi, the brains behind the proejct, once told me: The consortium is taking over Manoel Island not because it wants to... it has no commercial value!... but as a quid pro quo for the benefits we're securing at Tigne. The project will upgrade the island without expecting any profit. 

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PERSONALITY CULT

For long years, we stood in condemnation of the cult of personality as cultivated in authoritarian states. Finally, even those states which used to practise it ended up condemning the system. A liberal and democratic society, so it was said, is the safeguard against personality cults. But how true is this?

Actually, putting politics to the side, personality cult forms are appearing everywhere, given the very nature of the social means of communication and how they're being run, increasingly under the control of the wealthy. They operate via mechanisms that are very different from those run by the Hitler and Stalin regimes, but they are being just as effective. In business, sport, entertainment, including why not, politics. We simply don't use the same terminology but they still remain personality cults - so that whoever's located at the top is seen as supreme.