Prime Minister Robert Abela toured Gozo last week, promising fast ferries, new roads, modernised schools and a hundred separate proposals designed to extract every vote from the Gozitan residents. Meanwhile, the Gozo Minister responsible for his Planning Authority and his Superintendent of Cultural Heritage have spent the same seven days quietly signing the death warrants of two of Gozo's most precious heritage sites. The Prime Minister hands out the sweets at the front door while his officials carry the family silver out the back. History will record this week as the infamous moment when the Prime Minister sold Gozo twice over in the space of a few days, betrayed by the very institutions that swore to protect Gozo. Two decisions, falling within hours of each other on the eve of a general election, have stripped away whatever fig leaf still covered the obscene marriage between our political class and the developers who finance them.

The Planning Authority approved 22 apartments and 20 underground garages. This development is less than 200 metres from the Ġgantija Temples, Neolithic structures predating the Egyptian Pyramids. The site is also within the buffer zone of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Ten members of the Planning Board voted in favour, and only one, the NGO representative Romano Cassar, found the courage to vote against.

To understand the full obscenity of what has happened in Gozo last week, you need only look across the channel to Malta. Eighteen months ago, a citizens' petition gathered 29,000 signatures demanding that the Government should intervene and save Manoel Island from MIDI plc and turn into a national park. Prime Minister Robert Abela initially defended the concession and warned that cancelling it would cost taxpayers hundreds of millions. Then the political weather shifted, the petition kept growing, and Abela executed a spectacular U-turn that journalists across the political spectrum described as populist. The government will pay MIDI over 47 million euros to reclaim Manoel Island. The actual restoration costs are only about 11 million euros.

A few months later, Abela announced the cancellation of the White Rocks complex development. The site, a former British military barracks, will become a second national park with a permanent guarantee against construction. Two former British military sites, both in heavily populated Labour-leaning electoral districts on the main island, both rescued at the eleventh hour by direct prime ministerial intervention. Compare that record with the silence emanating from Castille over Fort Chambray and Ġgantija this week, and you understand precisely how this government values Gozitan heritage.

I keep returning to the image of Pontius Pilate washing his hands before the howling crowd. He knew the man before him was innocent, yet he yielded to the mob because keeping his position mattered more than doing what was right. Kurt Farrugia, the Superintendent of Cultural Heritage, is like a modern-day Pilate. His job is to protect our heritage from vandalism, yet he's in a position of authority. Din l-Art Ħelwa, Malta's National Trust, has called for his immediate resignation. They stated his conduct was that of a rubber-stamp for the Planning Authority and the developer's ambitions. The Superintendent did not object to the relocation of the Barracks facade. He withdrew his earlier objection to the Ġgantija development after a Heritage Impact Assessment (HIA) that even his critics describe as riddled with internal contradictions. He ignored an emergency conservation order requested by a coalition of NGOs and signed by hundreds of citizens. Like Pilate, he had every chance to refuse and chose instead to deliver the verdict the powerful wanted.

Consider what the Fort Chambray decision actually permits. Developers will demolish 80 percent of the sole British military barracks on Gozo. They are unashamedly suggesting removing its arcaded facade and including it in a luxury hotel front elevation, losing its original context. This was the first overseas married quarters built anywhere in the British Empire and served as a hospital during the Gallipoli and Salonika campaigns of the First World War. Europa Nostra, the largest heritage network in Europe, listed the Barracks among the seven most endangered sites on the entire continent for 2026. The Maltese state responded to that warning with a tribunal decision sanctioning the very destruction the European heritage community is rallying to prevent. White Rocks, a barracks of vastly less historical pedigree built in the 1960s as holiday accommodation for British servicemen, gets a national park and a perpetual guarantee. The Fort Chambray Barracks, with their nineteenth-century Globigerina limestone built by the master mason of Ta' Pinu Sanctuary, Victor Vella from Zebbug, are getting the wrecking ball. So we have different islands, different rules.

Now look to Xagħra village and consider what 20 underground garages actually mean in a place like this. The Ġgantija temples have stood on that plateau for five and a half thousand years, predating Stonehenge, predating the pharaohs, predating writing itself. The land surrounding them has never given up its secrets willingly. Every serious excavation in the vicinity has yielded ceramics, animal bones, ritual deposits, and traces of the Neolithic settlement that sustained the temple-builders themselves. The Brochtorff Circle, just metres away, produced one of the richest prehistoric burial complexes in Europe and forced archaeologists to rewrite entire chapters of Maltese prehistory. Now imagine mechanical diggers tearing eight or ten metres into that same archaeologically saturated ground to carve out 20 parking spaces for a speculative apartment block. Mechanical diggers will grind whatever lies beneath that traditional farmhouse into rubble. The HIA acknowledged the development's visual dominance and potential negative precedent. However, they still deemed the impact insignificant. The Coalition for Gozo NGOs called this an abject failure of judgement. I say they are being polite in their comments.

The contrast between Manoel Island and Fort Chambray writes its own statement. Both are former military sites of major historical importance. Both were the subject of long-running concession battles. Manoel Island is opposite Sliema, in an election-deciding constituency. Fort Chambray, however, is in Għajnsielem on an island with a population too small for a Maltese district. Abela picked up the phone for Manoel Island. He picked up the phone for White Rocks but he did not pick up the phone for Fort Chambray or for Ġgantija, and he never will, because Gozitan heritage produces fewer votes per acre than Maltese heritage. Pilate at least felt the need to wash his hands. Our planners and politicians do not bother. They sign the permits in broad daylight, shake hands with the developers, and tell the cameras that progress demands sacrifices. But it's always Gozo that is sacrificed.