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Karl Schembri
With all the Maltese people appointed by the government as brand managers, no wonder there are no beach managers to keep away the rogues turning some of the most popular bays into a veritable hell.
Readers have complained of the daily parties being organised in Golden Bay, mostly for foreign students, with loud speakers blasting and scaring away families and tourists alike and organisers bullying people into leaving the public area.
Despite the official conditions laid out in the police permits and the Mellieha local council’s clearance on condition that they do not cause inconvenience to third parties, organisers are clearly getting away with murder as the authorities remain indifferent to the complainants’ pleas. It is the same indifference that is also leaving the beautiful Gnejna bay to rot in rubbish, sewage and illegal camps.
“This situation is happening practically everyday and it has become impossible to go to the beach and relax – one of the few things that this country has left to offer,” an exasperated reader said after being forced away from Golden Bay last Monday by the intimidating bullies organising the party. “Although the police were called, they never turned up and people on the beach were bullied off the ‘restricted area’ by the very arrogant organisers.
Besides police inaction on these reports, even the local council seems impotent and is unable to enforce the very conditions it lays out in its clearance to party organisers.
“We cannot enforce the conditions,” Mellieha Mayor John Buttigieg admitted when contacted. “We have no means to enforce them. Wardens work until 7pm, and it would be too expensive to engage them on the beach. It is only the police who can stop the permit breaches, though I doubt some of the organisers get a police permit at all. The truth is that even if we had to decline to give clearance, they would still hold their activities.”
The mayor said the Malta Tourism Authority had initially sent a couple of beach wardens in a project that was however aborted in a matter of days.
“They came over here a couple of times but then they stopped as it was too expensive,” Buttigieg said.
Even this is Malta, as the MTA’s branding campaign goes, and yet nothing is being done about it.
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