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I refer to last week’s desultory attack without substance signed by the Sliema PN councillors. The letter featured my name many times. It seems that this is how the PN targets personally anyone who tries to protest the councillors and stands in the way of their contractor friends.
The PN councillors mentioned ‘malicious claims’ and ‘categorically denies’ the meeting between the PN Councillors and the Prime Minister. I did not invent the meeting between the Prime Minister and PN councillors – this was reported in The Times dated February 23, 2005, under the big heading “PM steps in to protect residents”. This article made the Prime Minister seem like a knight in shining armour protecting the residents from evil. This image was shattered less than twenty-four hours later in another Times report where it seems that Dr Gonzi turned tail and left the residents unprotected.
In the past, the PN harassed me on several occasions, on issues like when I was fighting to stop mobile antennas being placed on children’s schools and apartment buildings. It happened when I tried to stop the PN councillors from illegally giving thousands of liri of badly needed pavement council funds to football clubs. It happened when the ‘playing field’ contract was awarded for about Lm40,000 instead of about Lm25,000 – I intervened and the price suddenly came back down to about Lm26,000. The list goes on and on.
Now the PN’s latest scandal is to give two public prime waterfront sites to a contractor for a pittance. In return the Sliema residents get carbon monoxide poisoning from over 800 cars, the fumes being inhaled by their children playing in the small area that the the huge money-making business did not take over. The carbon monoxide fumes cause serious illnesses. Yet the PN councillors, the minister (supposedly) for the environment and even the Prime Minister are not asking for an Environment Impact report.
The two projects in question are the following – the first is Qui-Si-Sana car park where instead of a clean peaceful waterfront garden, it seems that the PN councillors want a ‘Paceville’ type tourism establishment, as described in the brief, so that they appease their minister. The second project is the destruction of Ghar il-Lembi and Ghar id-Dud and other caves that are millions of years old so that the same contractor can build a car park for his bar and restaurants.
The planning officers that are evaluating one project, are being bullied or ordered to place recommendations for approval, immaterial of what the studies indicate. The environmental impact assessment has been omitted, maybe because the PN do not want to quantify the damage that they are going to cause. The traffic impact assessment study done by MEPA is now ‘Top Secret’, ‘an internal document’ we were told by Mr Bernard Ferry of MEPA “that citizens are not allowed to see”.
Are we living in the European Union or in a model of Saddam Hussein’s former regime?
Although the PN councillors are all signing the letters, I believe that many of them do not agree with the Minister’s position, but their hands are tied.
The Sliema residents are well aware of who is acting in their interest and who is acting in the interest of the contractors and businessmen.
As for me, to be in a minority of one, does not make one wrong.
Martin J. De Bono
Sliema Local Councillor
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