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Last week, hunting supremo Lino Farrugia told us all about our basic instinct. Luckily for us we were not treated to a Sharon Stone-style show of uncrossed legs and flashing panties by the secretary of the Maltese Federation for Hunting and Conservation – he was simply explaining why he thought that spring hunting should continue to be allowed in Malta.
According to Farrugia we are all crouching tigers and hidden dragons lying in wait to pounce upon our unsuspecting prey. He says that the hunting instinct is one of the most basic instincts of mankind and asks “Can anyone honestly say that, as kids, they never felt the urge to capture a wild bird or animal?” To which rhetorical question the overwhelming majority of people would answer “No” – they haven’t experienced this powerful urge to catch and kill animals. They don’t want to blast birds out of the sky, wring their neck or coop them up in small cages. What young children feel is curiosity and a desire to pet and cuddle animals and not to pepper them with lead shot as Farrugia’s friends do.
Rather than describing the slaughter of small birds in the same breathless tones used by Farrugia (“The kill, when it occurs, is the final act of the hunt” – You don’t say? There we were thinking that it wasn’t so final for the robins with a bellyful of lead), many children, and adults for that matter, feel distressed when they see the lifeless carcass of a once vibrant, beautiful bird. However Farrugia dismisses these feelings. He tells us that no one can judge hunting without first hand experience. His justification for the cruel and barbaric sport he practices is that it is an expression of man’s basic instincts. Well, not giving in to our basic instincts is a sign that man has evolved somewhat from his Neanderthal days. Self-control is a sign of civility not ignorance or namby-pambiness as Farrugia seems to imply. If everybody had to give in to their basic instincts, ugly men would be ravishing all the women who crossed their path, and you could beat anyone you didn’t agree with to a bloody pulp. As it is, the Maltese hunters are the only ones acting freely in accordance with their basic instincts. Unfortunately for the rest of us, the hunter’s basic instinct is turning out to be a very bad movie.
“Cheaters” is a reality television programme where suspicious individuals get private investigators to film the partners who they believe to be having an affair. The best moment of the programme takes place when the suspect is confronted with the footage showing his wrong-doing, at which point he simply has to face the music. When faced with the undisputed facts, the cheater has to come clean and admit that all his talk about going out to get the satellite card unscrambled was a cover-up for his bad behaviour, and that he was really playing away.
I can do without the covert filming, but I’d relish the opportunity to confront Lawrence Gonzi with the facts about the proposed Qui-Si-Sana project. They are quite simple. All can be verified from the plans lodged at MEPA by the developer. The project consists of the largest bowling alley in Malta, a theatre/cinema, an exhibition centre, an open air restaurant and bar, a childcare centre, an exchange bureau, health spa and gym, juice bar, cafeteria, newsagent, a sandwich bar and other unspecified retail areas attached to a car park. The Prime Minister would have us believe that this is not a Bay Street-style entertainment complex. He said so, on his last-gasp stop before the local council elections on the “Opinjonisti” discussion programme.
He said that people who believed it would be an entertainment complex were being misled by others who want to take advantage of their gullibility. Actually he is calling us fools – simpletons who cannot read the words written on the plans submitted by the contractor. It is clear that the project is a full-blown entertainment complex which will attract traffic and needs its own car park for this reason.
Introducing an entertainment complex of this size to a residential area spells chaos. A restaurant in the area has been flouting planning and health and safety laws for the past ten years. The authorities have looked on helplessly. And we are meant to believe that they can cope with Paceville’s younger brother? There should be no confusion of issues. There would be little or no objection to the introduction of an underground car park and reinstatement of the garden. A controlled residential parking zone could work. But the proposed entertainment complex is unwanted and unnecessary. If the car park on its own is not commercially viable, as Parliamentary Secretary Edwin Vassallo has stated, then the government can utilise our taxes and Commuted Car Park payments to finance it. And the prime minister and his ministers should come clean and admit that the Qui-Si-Sana project is a Bay Street doppelganger.
I have regular tiffs with a colleague who considers the scheduling of houses to be an infringement of the right to private property. He thinks that the right to own property is absolute and if the owner of a distinctive or old house wants to raze it to the ground and build a skyscraper instead of it, then he should be allowed to do so. My colleague thinks that no government should prohibit the owner from disposing of his property in any way he deems fit. When buildings of architectural, aesthetic or historical importance are scheduled they must be preserved in their entirety, and depending upon the degree of protection afforded to them, their alteration or demolition is prohibited. Owners of such properties feel hard done by. They insist that they are being penalised for owning a beautiful house. Their house cannot be demolished so it is worth much less to the plot-hungry developers who want to buy it to build tower blocks.
To a certain extent the owners are right. They are unable to dispose of their property for the maximum amount of profit possible, but at the same time they have to pay the maintenance expenses to keep their property in a good state of repair. This is a tough burden to shoulder.
The owners of scheduled properties are the safe keepers of our heritage. They hold the properties which are our link to the past, the few architectural gems which shine out amongst the soulless concrete horrors all over the island. We should be rewarding them for doing this. The least government could do is to give them a tax rebate on their maintenance expenses. A heritage fund should be set up for the preservation of these houses so that their owners could receive some form of income to offset their financial loss.
At the moment Eileen Montesin’s voice is blaring out enthusiastically over the radio as she invites listeners to a meeting with the Prime Minister so that they can suggest how the EUR850 million bounty can be spent. Always on the off chance that the Prime Minister ever listens to what people say, he should pull out his notebook and list down the suggestion for a heritage fund. That would be money well-spent.
cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt
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