GozoNews.Com

“During my last few visits to Gozo I have noticed a general tendency towards a run down appearance in various areas throughout the island.

The building work at the Citadel seems to have been going on for ages now. Now don’t get me wrong. I know that the repair and restoration of such an old and beautiful part of the island cannot happen overnight, but over the past few years I’ve been getting the impression that nothing is happening at all. You can see scaffolding in various areas of the outer walls, but I have never seen anyone on this scaffolding and the walls continue to deteriorate. I’m beginning to wonder if the scaffolding was put there in a vain attempt to hold the walls up.

This situation is not only apparent at the Citadel. Take a quick trip to Xlendi tower and you will see the same situation again, with scaffolding in position for years. You begin to wonder if the tower is holding up the scaffolding or vice versa. Chambray Fort in Mgarr is another example, although in this case it doesn’t even have the added luxury of scaffolding.

The quarries at Qala seem to be spreading outwards at an alarming rate with whole areas of land being buried under rock.

The island has a host of beautiful churches and one of the best, if not the best, has to be Ta’ Pinu. Yet as you drive down the road to the church you are confronted with the sight of derelict buildings including an old toilet block.

The amount of illegal dumping taking place on the island is alarming. It seems that every time you turn a corner you find that someone has been dumping general household rubbish or building materials. I like to swim in the blue hole but I didn’t go in last year as it was full of old plastic bottles, plastic bags and who knows what else.

I’ve only mentioned a few of the places here, which I feel are becoming a major problem, but are you starting to see a pattern? These are the very places which attract tourists to Gozo.

Gozo is a tourist-oriented island. It relies on people like me coming to the island and spending money to provide the economical lifeblood required to keep the island alive. I started to think that this would not be allowed to happen back home in N. Ireland. Every council here has an environmental health department whose primary objective is to prevent this sort of thing from happening. Why doesn’t Gozo have the same sort of protection?

I ran a search on Gozo and environment and imagine my surprise when I found the website of the Malta Environment and Planning Authority. These are the very people who are supposed to be responsible for the environment on Gozo. So my question, is a very simple one: What in God’s name are these people doing to the island of Gozo? I work in a factory environment and I can tell you right now that if I were as incompetent in my job as these people appear to be at theirs I would be out of work tomorrow.

I could be wrong here, and I hope I am, but it appears that the plan is to let all the tourist attractions fall down, use the area left to dump rubbish on, build an airstrip and a few big hotels and then try to attract tourists to the island by advertising it as the world’s only landfill island! There have been inhabitants and buildings on Gozo for over 6,000 years. A lot of people have tried to control or in fact destroy the island in that time. It would appear that where people like the Romans, Greeks, Arabs, Phoenicians, Barbary pirates and Turks failed in their actions, Mepa is determined to succeed by its inaction.”

Alex Tyrrell
5 Lower Cairncastle Road,
Larne,
County Antrim,
N. Ireland BT40 1PG