The Speaker of the House, Carmelo Abela, said he will be conducting meetings so that "the required balance between protecting the security of the building, Members of Parliament, employees, and all those who visit the Parliament building" can be found.

The Speaker was replying to a parliamentary question submitted by Nationalist MP Darren Carabott who asked whether a solution could be found to remove barriers that surround the entrance to the parliamentary building.

Writing about this on his Facebook page, Carabott said that with Abela becoming the new Speaker of the House, he took the opportunity to raise this question once again. Carabott said that he is happy to hear that Speaker Abela will be organising meetings to see if Parliament should do away with its line of barriers that have been affixed in front of it for the past years.

Carabott said that in his last four years of asking about whether these barriers can be removed, he has repeatedly been told that they were there for security reasons - reasons he did not personally agree with.

The Opposition MP wrote that while he understood this reasoning, "surely there are better methods."

"In my opinion, they desecrate the entrance to Valletta - and convey the wrong message," Carabott said in his Facebook post.

The PN MP noted that it is contradictory for Parliament to have a line of crowd barriers permanently installed to keep distance between passers-by and the Parliament House's entrance when MPs regularly knock on doors around the country for house visits in order to remain close to the people.

Carabott stated that "we shouldn't have barriers blocking Maltese people's access to our Parliament" and that, in his view, another solution must be found.

He concluded that even in terms of aesthetics, he disagrees that people entering the capital city should be greeted with a line of crowd barriers on the side once they walk through the Valletta's City Gate.

He added it is also contradictory that the Parliament building, designed by architect Renzo Piano, has "rows of barriers in front of it" when it was drawn up with the scope of being transparent and accessible.