The Self-Propelled Sitting Room

You poison my children and I do not seem to mind. I poison your children and you do not seem to mind. Thanks to me your aged mother runs a greater risk of dying of respiratory failure at the next heat wave but that's alright because, thanks to you, my mother runs the same risk. You breathe the air which has been run through the air cleaner in my car and I breathe the air carefully mixed with petrol or diesel in yours. We both breathe each other's exhaust fumes and we find that perfectly convenient.

Neither of us thinks much of the expense. Not really. The claims of injustice regarding exorbitant car registration taxes are mostly an expression of our wish to spend more, our chaffing at the fact that the tax burden prevents us having a bigger, shinier beast.

It is rarely the careful computation of those who resent the fact that such a vast segment of their income is devoted to their means of transport. Turning the key for the first time in your brand new pride-and-joy loses you around 10 per cent of what you pay to buy it.

In those few seconds, before you have moved a millimetre, in a car worth a mere €20,000, you have enjoyed €2,000 worth of undiluted pleasure. Never having had the experience myself, I am consumed by the curiosity of the innocent.

And it does not stop there. Whether your treasure is paid in cash or bought by hire purchase (and there is a huge difference), the total is subtly hiked up by the rate of income tax you pay.

Do you garage the precious thing? How much does that cost you per day? What fraction of the cost of your home is attributed to your garage? Did you buy or do you rent the place? It appreciates in value does it? Except that you will never realise your gains until you decide to get rid of your car.

There are also the annual tolls of insurance and road tax, a ticket or two, servicing and fuel, occasionally, parking fees. Meanwhile, the process which started when you first fired up the engine has carried on inexorably eating away at the value of your latter-day coach and horses.

Summed up by an expert friend of mine, it was all estimated to run up to €15 per day on a €20,000 car.

If, like me, you are a driving addict, you may be tempted to put the pleasure of driving into the scales. Unfortunately, there seems to be hardly anywhere left to put even the most modest of our darlings through its paces. I reckon that average driving speed has dropped far below 40kph, increasing the risk of accident by dropping off at the wheel through sheer boredom.

It must be torture for those who never liked driving in the first place. My heart also goes out to the owners of those over-engineered, mobile monuments to ostentatious imbecility who sit in air-conditioned embarrassment in traffic jam after traffic jam fully air-bagged and protected against high-speed impact which is never likely to happen unless they attempt suicide at some unique moment when the road is clear.

When justification by satisfaction fails, we turn to necessity. How would we get to work without our cars? How would we do the shopping? And how would we be able to ferry the kids from school, to private lessons or pick them up when they go out? What about those five-errand journeys altogether impossible by any other means? How would we go for a picnic otherwise? Poisoning one another at huge expense is an absolute necessity, isn't it?

Only because we have no other real choice at present. Only because we have designed our lives around car ownership allowing our destinations to spread far and wide. Only because we do not imagine putting our resources together to provide ourselves with alternatives. Only because nobody in authority has the stomach to broach the subject.

There exists an astounding array of alternatives to private car ownership, tried and tested elsewhere, which have never crossed the mind of anybody in Malta with the political power to reach out and make one possible. Malta is 24 kilometres long at its longest axis, Gozo about eight kilometres. The idea that we are left almost without any option other than the private car is simply mind-boggling.

Malta needs a mass transit system but we have not begun to talk about it yet. It could be by tram, overhead mono-rail or underground railway. It is still decades away because we were too busy to think for the last several decades.

The existing public transport network could be enormously improved by being decentralised and by developing circular routes linking regional localities.

There are several options in private mobility: from car pooling to timesharing vehicles, from pay-per-use vehicles linked to our mobile phones to chauffeur-driven luxury. All of which are miles cheaper than owning a car and just as flexible. Malta could very easily become the only country in the EU in which cars become almost exclusively weekend or pastime items but only if its 400,000 inhabitants decided that it would be a good idea.

Of course, there are an almost infinite number of challenges, systems to adjust and practices to change. How will wholesalers distribute their goods?

What about heavy vehicle traffic? How will sales assistants get around? Doctors doing their rounds? Were any traffic reduction measure ever to succeed, would that not ease pressure and restore our appetite for more cars?

Addressing them all will not address our rapid cultural mutation into a people expressing itself through its motor vehicle. It would take massive investment in a public education campaign to get us to shed our need to stun the neighbours by our extravagance, our exquisite taste in pollution source and our ability to customise the mass produced.

What else could stand a chance against the millions of euros spent each year indoctrinating the masses through car advertising, half-naked women sprawled over the bonnet of one of our ancient buses?

Is it not amusing that it is illegal to advertise cigarettes but perfectly legal to pitch the internal combustion engine?

It would be too much to expect any political party with 50 per cent plus electoral ambitions to even begin to hint at anything rational. In Malta, where it should be the easiest task of all, it is said to be risky even for the Greens to be so futuristic as to talk of reducing traffic significantly. If we get too far ahead of the field, our adversaries would have too easy a time making us out to be eccentric, far out and extremist.

Still, this is precisely our function: to point out the obvious facts that few people are willing to acknowledge; to point out the very long-term policy options; to have a vision which is not a regurgitation of the past; to propose today what our adversaries will make their own only decades in the future. We have more or less done away with the habit of buying our cars second hand. How about getting our politics first hand for a change?

Pure Evil

The sudden illness of the leader of the opposition has called for a truce in an election campaign in all but name which has been ratcheting up since September. Everybody has wished him a speedy recovery. Nobody wants to be seen to be hacking away at Alfred Sant, the public persona, while the physical Alfred Sant is laid low by ill health. It is not so much the merit of the political class which sets itself a limit but that of a population which would not stomach political business as usual in such circumstances.

It does seem hypocritical to be humane to an adversary whose plans and ambitions one has opposed and thwarted by every possible means for years on end. His worst political enemies have no choice: better to be suspected of hypocrisy (nothing new) than to become a self-confessed monster of inhumanity.

Most people are genuinely affected. Those who can never be classed among his sympathizers or supporters are also showing and feeling sympathy for him. Cast as the principal focus of their political apprehension, he is suddenly revealed to be only human, very human indeed. Their natural instinct for compassion is provoked, to a very great extent dissipating the effect of months and years of demonisation.

It is a disaster for the PN spindoctors: all geared up to raise the tempo in the final run up to a first quarter election in 2008, they are obliged to pull back, regroup and rethink their strategies. An early election would be seen to be bad PR by not giving Dr Sant sufficient time to recover and return to the fray. The blizzard of ridicule and invective has to be stopped.

This may have significant consequences on the cohort of new voters who seem to be the only element that is consistently responsible for changes in government. Hammering away at Dr Sant’s image and keeping him a figure of contempt may have been expected to deprive him of the degree of coolness necessary to secure a segment of young neutrals more than likely to vote for change by default.

We need only wait a little while. The PN spin factory will certainly find a way around its difficulties and surprise us all with its creativity. It is endowed with real talent for creating virtual reality and blessed with an attentive, all-forgiving audience: the range of possibilities is almost infinite.

Timing the election remains a dilemma. Anything after the end of March brings in the effect of price hikes over a wide range of consumer goods as well as the debacle over hunting in April. Anything from here to end March could seem like a desperate measure to steal a march on Dr Sant as he valiantly struggles to get back into stride.

Dr Sant himself may be of assistance. His entourage will encourage him to climb back into the saddle as soon as possible, not only to do battle with the ancestral foe but also to discourage any discussion of a political succession on the eve of an election. This is an MLP dilemma: allowing any hint of leadership vacuum to be created is dangerous, a return to business as usual too early could be just as dangerous by allowing the PN to return to their customary tone and even to consider a return to their original strategies on the timing of the election.

Whatever happens, Dr Sant can no longer be tagged pure evil in spin and slander. Still, his faults and defects will not be glossed over and his own past actions or failures will not be erased from memory but the mounting demonisation we had every reason to expect in the coming months will have to give way to something else.

It suits me fine. Perhaps we can become as grown up as children who read Roald Dahl instructions on the identification of witches. Sticking to stereotypes may be a dangerous self-deception. Our list of suspects must be expanded to include those who cast themselves as “sweet and nice” in order to gain our trust to do us harm. The concept of a good looking witch is a valuable acquisition for any child. Why not for grown ups too?

With Dr Sant demoted by fate from the invidious title of pure evil, we stand a better chance of realising that there is no such thing at all. It is never really that easy. If our greatest menace sported horns and a long tail, we would all be fine. Of course we can have no further use at this point for Roald Dahl’s tips: no politician should be eliminated simply for wearing pointy shoes, for having an itchy head nor for having a strangely coloured tongue, even if it does happen to be blue.

In my book, colour has nothing to do with it but there are some acid tests. First of all, for people who stand as candidates in an election, rather than attempting to become dictators by force of arms, democratic credentials must be up to scratch. It rapidly eliminates at least two thirds of those presently in parliament who approved the change to the constitution which creates two tiers of citizens: those whose votes will be weighed with utmost care to produce perfect proportionality and those whose votes will not be fully weighed in, no matter what happens.

Pure evil takes on a different meaning at this point. It becomes evil posing as pure. Of course strict proportionality is an excellent democratic quality. It becomes less than pure when it is applied to some and not to all. Those who palm it off as a universal salve to our electoral ills are not without taint. None of them. Did any MP vote against or abstain? Not even the sweetest and the nicest?

With that criterion alone, many would be reduced to voting those in their favourite political party who were not asked to vote on constitutional changes, the new faces. There will be dozens of them in the next election and not without good reason. Their function is to sponge up No 1 votes from people who cannot bring themselves to vote for established candidates who have disappointed them bitterly. The new candidates will seem very sweet and very nice especially when compared to their colleagues who have been wheeling and dealing, U-turning and S-bending all over the place. That is the very reason that they will swell the lists.

They seem pure but they whitewash every evil great and small. By standing as candidates, they endorse all that has been done. They perpetuate the status quo. They lend themselves to a process which gives the status quo a new lease on life. At least the battle weary candidates stand before us showing all the signs of their passage. The new faces invite us to believe that they have nothing to do with all that has aroused our ire. They lull our resentment, they bewitch us far more than those who have offended us.

The question is do we want a change and I do not mean do we want to flip the omelette? Going from a Blue one-party government to a Red one-party government brings a change of the guard, a change of the clique at the helm without even a major change in the mix of financiers of the one party in government. The names and faces may change but the system will be precisely the same.

A mere 2,500 of us voting Green in any one of the thirteen electoral districts can bring about a change far more profound than can be hoped for by the hundreds of thousands who will put their vote elsewhere. It will no longer require the serious illness of a principal political figure for us to be reminded of our humanity. We can hope to begin to forget the serial demonisation of whoever leads the other side. We will begin to develop our critical faculties to higher levels driving the whole political class to compete more on substance and to rely far less on stereotypes devised by their backroom boys and girls. Only ordinary voters can bring about such a change. Politicians are their product: every combination of pure and evil performing at the highest or at the lowest levels of decency, honesty, consistency and democracy according to their fateful choice.

Never a Better Time

It is the time for taking stock of 2007 and making a guess at 2008. From my perspective everything in 2007 makes the change possible in 2008 all the more alluring, useful and necessary.

The economy has shown signs of recovery and the Euro changeover will be celebrated as some sort of certificate of economic strength. It is certainly a long way from the admission of deliberate deception in 2003. Thank God we joined the EU.

Had we not joined, that fatal admission of economic recklessness might never have happened until it was too late. We have been obliged by the EU Commission to provide an acceptable account of the administration of our public finances and bound to a path of economic discipline. Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi and Parliamentary Secretary Tonio Fenech will bask in the light of success thrust upon them. So be it.

Would it not be wonderful if the EU Commission could poke its nose into everything else binding our governments hand and foot, delivering them like parcels to the next celebration of success? Unfortunately this is not possible and we remain solely responsible in very many areas where the EU Commission cannot and will not be our nanny. We are responsible for choosing a government that will act reasonably and sensibly in order to succeed

In a few days’ time we will be paying and being paid in Euros. For a while we will suffer the disorientation to which we are exposed at Christmastime when the holiday season makes it a little harder to make out which day of the week it is: a temporary need to keep our bearings a little more deliberately. A week or two into the New Year and we will behave as though we always dealt in Euros.

And then we will realize that getting into the Eurozone does not change the fundamentals. It will be very similar to joining the EU. There are benefits and significant ones for those who realize them and are in a position to take advantage of them. For the population as a whole there are advantages but they hard to perceive. There are also disadvantages and risks which must be recognized and dealt with. The Euro is not a magic wand which will take all our troubles away. We will still have to earn our living in a highly competitive world.

The New Year will be precisely like the old year, as it always is. The sun will rise and it will set, there will be rain and it will shine again. Even the general elections will come and go. The question is what will we make of it all? Just like EU membership and joining the Eurozone, it is a matter of what we will choose to do once the opportunity to choose has been secured.

The pattern is almost identical. The hype and frenzy of an election campaign preceded EU membership. With the Euro there is less controversy and less opportunity for hysterics. In all cases we are wound up for the event and distracted as to the unfolding of events afterwards. We are focused on a target and everything beyond it becomes blurred. It is extremely difficult to speak of the world beyond the target while we are about to shoot, to make the final choice.

Then, even as we fire, it dawns on us once more that hitting the target is the briefest of events in an infinite series. It is the stroke of midnight on December 31st. The party might not be over but the tension is gone. We will soon be back at work.

If the opposition had not bent over backwards to make itself an also-ran, the government would be in serious trouble. After twenty years in office, the PN could not seriously expect to win the next election if it faced anything like a reasonable alternative. It should be a foregone conclusion that Labour will win the next election but nobody has any reason to feel that way. The early months of 2008 should be a confident, almost majestic march to office for the Labour Party but nobody believes that they will be.

Nationalist spin doctors have had a hard time pumping up the fear factor. The dose of election campaign adrenaline prior to Christmas is not a sign of desperation as to the outcome but evidence of the need to gain time: to build up steam in an engine that will be hard to get going. There really is no Devil on the other side, so the spin doctors have to invent him. It does not help them at all that the Devil does everything possible to be a clown.

Still, they will persuade thousands upon thousands to vote in fear and safeguard the status quo….. from what exactly? A Labour government having run the country in the past few years would, more than likely, be stretching out to bask in the warm light of success on entry into the Eurozone if it had been bound hand and foot as ours has been. No matter who runs the country after the next election, the EU Commission and the European Central Bank will not tolerate the level of tomfoolery that were inflicted upon us by our governments prior to 2003.

If I were to choose just one achievement of the very many which Alternattiva Demokratika has secured for the Maltese through its very active, if short, political life, that would have to be EU membership. The taboo imposed by the Gonzi government on giving the Greens merit for their part in securing that epochal change certifies the efficacy of our key contribution prior to the 2003 Referendum. Our prediction has been proved right. The PN wanted to join the EU as some sort of insurance against the MLP. The MLP did not want to join because the PN wanted to. Neither of them has acclimatized to the EU environment.

The PN clocks up infringements of EU laws as though it had opposed EU membership and the MLP tries but fails to forget that it had opposed joining. Thankfully both are bond hand and foot to the mass of legislation which is a certain guarantee for citizens and endless trouble for recalcitrant politicians. The Greens in 2003 determined the future for the PN and the MLP.

In 2008 we have an opportunity to secure an even more fundamental change. This time, unlike 2003, the PN will be doing it utmost to prevent us. From here to the election the PN will scare the living daylights out of its supporters predicting cataclysm if the MLP is elected to government even though it knows full well that this is already a very remote possibility. It has already won over the MLP, what it wants to secure is victory over the Greens, over change.

Only the Greens can change Malta’s political landscape and everybody knows it. The PN leadership is challenged only by the Greens and the awesome possibility of the Greens being in parliament in a few months’ time to shake up the place for good. It is the one scenario they truly dread: for the first time in four decades they will have to do politics and not merely rule like sultans.

Beyond the target we are being invited to focus upon, lies to possibility of a completely new political landscape, something that we can all achieve in 2008 which we could not enjoy in previous years. As you draw your bow and hold your breath and squint it would add to your chances if you envision what you want to achieve. Do you really want everything to stay exactly the same as it is? Are you quite sure that the best thing to be had is a PN government free of any checks and balances, free to extend development zones illegally in a country possessed of 53,000 vacant properties?

Imagine an election result in which neither the PN nor the MLP can take over the streets in celebration after the election? Imagine no olé olé and no red flags. Imagine the settling down to form a coalition government requiring not consensus within a party but consensus between political parties, just as happens every time in almost every country in the EU. From that moment politics in Malta will change forever. It will begin to change from that very first moment. Everything that comes afterwards will be different and we will not return to winner-takes-all and governments held unaccountable thanks to the awful prospect of the alternative.

Since May 2007 I have been visiting people in their homes every day. It was a long, hot summer. The Greens did not wait for the PN spin crew to start the election fever, we opted for slow but sure. Nobody I spoke to assumed that Labour would win. Nobody. Yet another PN victory is as certain as it could possibly be at this point in time. The PN will return to power once more surprising their supporters who were made to believe that everything hung by a thread.

Never was it a better time to change the course of our history. Never was it a better time to have Greens debate in parliament to challenge and propose, to bring in a wealth of ideas attuned to the times, to take responsibility and to decide. It is time. It was never a better time.

My proposal for 2008 is for us all to take our time, to resist the pressures to focus on the stroke of midnight. It could be the worst thing we could do. The clock does not stop then. What do we want for New Year’s Day and for the days, months and years that will certainly follow? If we refuse to be rushed, panicked and stampeded, we can choose a better, calmer, more reasonable future in which ordinary citizens will have far more influence on the political class. The choice we have is between making our future and sticking to our past.

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Eyes Bright at Christmas Time

It was about this time some years ago when my son came home from kindergarten and announced that Father Christmas is a fraud and that God does not exist. A friend who had only just shed his own diaper had given him these certainties. My own upbringing seemed even more like a series of events in the late Neolithic.

It was not hard for my parents to have me believe in Father Christmas, the world conspired with them. Far from anybody contesting the existence of the Almighty, there seemed to be a wall to wall belief. We acquired our faith by osmosis simply by being exposed to the religious practices which permeated our daily lives long before we were formally prepared for our First Holy Communion.

We acquired religion and associated traditions just as we acquired speech. Did I even ask how Father Christmas broke into our house and delivered gifts for six children without the benefit of a chimney? Why should I? There were four angels guarding my bed every night and a guardian angel followed me around all day. All grown ups spoke about them so it did not matter much that I had never set eyes on them.

God was something like my grandmother who ruled a vast clan simply by being there. Her unspoken decrees were obeyed by the apparently infinite tiers of grown-ups towering above me. She was loved and respected by all the uncles, aunts and cousins who gathered at her house. Everybody was at pains not to incur her displeasure although I never heard her speak an angry word.

Nanna died in 1965 and it seems like a whole world died with her. Christmas was never the same after that. The vast clan had lost its focus, its five branches set apart to face the novelty of a world which combined the Cold War and the Cuban Misslie Crisis with the Vietnam War and Biafra with the mini skirt and the Beatles, the bomb, the pill and psychodelia. My guardian angel and all his mates had a hard time of it. I never asked him how he coped with Vatican Council II.

Malta went from misery to wealth. Emigration petered out as tourism picked up. Fortunes were made in the building industry and everybody waited his turn to scoop up the takings from a fabulous property deal. Politics was always a nasty business but it then turned deadly. All landmarks seemed to be gone forever. All certainties were gone.

Malta remains more Catholic than the Vatican but there is sometimes good reason to doubt whether it is even Christian any more. Christmas is good for business, indispensable for some businesses. Midnight Mass will be a standing room only affair as always with plenty of restaurants making a buck on Christmas breakfast. There are still plenty of intricate cribs to visit but can children be fascinated by a slow moving mechanical donkey when their own toys transform, squeal and pop to wireless command?

They will have to make their own way to belief or to the lack of it in a world with plenty of both. Wherever they get to, it will not be because everybody else did the same as far as the eye can see. They have something like a choice and they are brought up knowing that some do and some don’t believe. Their convictions will be their own.

One thing remains amid all the distractions: a child was born 2007 years ago and grew up to bear a message inviting us to love our enemies, to turn the other cheek. Sheep and shepherds may no longer be a part of our daily lives but the birth in a manger still calls us to something better than the fattest bank account of all.

Every year, we are reminded of our own mortality by all the ghosts of merry Christmases past. Even as we feast we realize that time is more precious than money and that the twinkle in a child’s eye is worth more than anything we could buy.

We may rant against the hypocrisy and the exploitation of Christmas if we choose, but heart of the matter remains no matter how deep it may become buried in tinsel and crackers, puddings and macaroni: there is happiness to be found in touching somebody’s heart, a reward far greater than the cost of any gift.

It is a Christian message which has been taken up by non-Christians the world over because it was always theirs also. Christians may believe that He came to remind us of the best part of our humanity, all others can experience the truth of it directly. Christmas provides an excellent annual opportunity indiscriminately. If we realize that nothing can make us happier than making others happy, we may have saved our souls even if we have come to doubt their existence. Nobody can doubt that the world becomes a slightly better place for it.

Ironically the absence of wall-to-wall Christianity allows its essence to shine brighter. Perhaps the commercial hullabaloo provides a sharper contrast to the peace promised on earth to men (and women) of good will. Christmas remains impervious to it all, pouncing out upon us when we least expect it: in “the ghastly tie so kindly meant” or in the taste of mince pies which remind us of somebody who loved us well. The more we are urged to rush about to spend and celebrate, the more poignant it is when we are reminded that we too have a heart and that we need not be ashamed of showing it.

May your hearts be touched this Christmas and may your eyes shine in reflection of the joy you bring to others.

Not A Moment To Spare

Listening to Martin Scicluna giving a Strickland Foundation lecture on climate change and how it affects Malta was both novel and deja vu'. He described Maltese politics as trench warfare: a noisy, bloody business with the combatants yards away from one another but completely lost in the fog of war, unable to see the whole picture, unable to consider anything but the immediate; prevented from leading the response to a universal challenge. It was nothing new to me. It was new to have somebody of his calibre speak so clearly.

My job as leader of the Greens in Malta is to drive a wedge in between the other two parties and to drive them into taking a look around them before they proceed with their trench warfare. All my energies are now dedicated to gathering the support of 2,500 of the 23,000 or so voters in an electoral district in order to give Malta a Green presence in Parliament and hopefully in government. It is all I can do.

Meanwhile, I must concentrate on what I have to do immediately. If the Greens are not elected to Parliament, the post-2008 eco-consciousness of the next government will be governed by the need for their financiers to make even more money: climate change panic will be used to provide them with more millions; a Sarkozian conversion to all things ecological as part of his global sales pitch of everything nuclear.

All we need are 2,500 votes in any district to begin to bring the change about. Then we can negotiate and cajole, we will be able to raise awareness and inform public policy. We can then begin to influence events to head us in the right direction and force the positive exploitation of Malta's privileged voice on an international level. It will be backed by convincing action at home.

Greens have been far ahead of mainstream politics on climate change awareness; we are still ahead of most on the post-awareness era. Having been optimists in the face of cataclysms unrecognised for decades, we are confident that we can continue to be optimists and hold on to a far more encouraging vision than those newly arrived to disaster view.

The world has just begun to react. We must envision success because failure does not bear contemplation. All our ingenuity will definitely be devoted to providing us all with an excellent quality of life to be achieved at a tiny fraction of the energy we require today, with far less consumption of materials and very little waste creation. Climate change will bring about not only political change but also profound economic, social, technological and cultural changes. The very real threat of climate change puts us on the threshold of a new era.

Silenzio

The view from the Franciscans' garden in Floriana is breathtaking. It had never been my lot to visit their little heaven before. It also came as a complete surprise at the end of a mass marking World Environment Day which I attended on invitation of the Church Environment Commission. The bishop of Gozo celebrated mass and gave a longish sermon.

I was treading a fine line I have set myself. As the leader of a political party which makes a clear distinction between religion and politics, attending masses and religious celebrations on formal invitation because of my post is always tricky. I am also a private person entitled to the wrestle with or to the surrender to God and to walk away from it if I choose. Generally speaking I avoid the religious bit simply to be there as a politician. Somehow it is much easier with faiths which are not my own. I have been to mosques, synagogues and Hindu temples, Bahai faith meetings and Buddhist events, where being a visitor is much easier. The terms of my presence are clear. In fact the hospitality offered to a stranger always creates a strong positive feeling, a definite warmth. There I represent politics, green politics and the respect it shows to all faiths and to philosophies of no faith.

As a catholic in a catholic religious celebration, the overlap with politics is uncomfortable. I do not want to be swept along, taken for granted to be one of the community or even under pressure to be seen to be so or risk coming under suspicion of being an apostate to the dominant faith. The fact that I am catholic is a complete accident as far as politics is concerned. I have no wish to secure votes on the basis of religious allegiance. I find the thought of it repulsive. Still, I feel the pull of those who are disgusted by the exploitation of religion for political purposes and of those who demand an obscene mingling of religion and politics. I know that almost nobody will understand what I am doing there: doing my job as a politician and acknowledging the immense social, cultural, political and now environmental potential of the Catholic Church in Malta.

Then again, this was special event. There have been few developments in recent years as positive and encouraging as the setting up of the Church Commission on the Environment. It is competent, prudent, precise and also courageous, above all it is authoritative. There can be no question of its enormous potential to create awareness of the environmental challenges we face to an extent we could not begin to hope for if it did not exist. The presence of the Bishop of Gozo rather than of the Archbishop is also very positive. So far the Gozo diocese does not have a Church Environment Commission of its own while Gozo faces an onslaught on the environment like never before. There is hope that the bishop of Gozo will avail himself of the services of the Maltese Commission and extend its positive influence to events in Gozo.

I definitely wanted to be there if my presence would be seen to be an encouragement to the ongoing process. It turned out that I was the only politician present and I enjoyed the experience all the more. Not least the surprise vista over the harbour with its twinkling lights. I will certainly accept the monks' invitation to return, to visit them privately, to learn more of Francis, their saint who called the sun his sister and the moon his brother, of his challenge to the nascent modern world eight centuries ago and of its relevance gaining strength with every passing day. Perhaps they will let me meditate in their garden, reached through the door marked Silenzio.

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Fighting Extiction

P is a boat builder. For some people it could be a job, for him it is a passion. He is driven by an ambition to restore traditional Maltese boats and to build some of the crafts which are no longer around. He is a precious piece of a puzzle I have been dying to solve.

Traditional Maltese boats are on the way to extinction. How many new ones have been built in recent years? Will fishermen replace the ones they still use or will they opt for craft less unique but cheaper or more cost-efficient? I have gone from interest to concern and then to near panic as I have been asked to champion the interests of groups of fishermen over the years.

In St Julian's the fishermen of this once traditional fishing village have come under pressure from the tourism industry. First their boathouses were taken over and transformed into restaurants then the quays became promenades and spaces for outdoor restaurants. They have become guests in their own house restricted in the times they can bring a boat ashore for maintenance or repair, hassled for leaving tackle on the quay.

It is the same everywhere from Marsaskala to Mgarr. Fishermen are poorly organised and rarely unable to withstand the combined force of restaurateurs, the local council and the police. ironically their boats are icons par excellence of everything Maltese. Enter a souvenir shop and count how many separate items showing a Luzzu or a Dghajsa you can pick out in five minutes' browsing. It is hard to believe that anything so iconic is so heavily persecuted. the latest has been the takeover of the PO Customs Shed in Pieta with no alternative offered to boat owners.

The reasoning is that other businesses make more money. Nobody stops to consider that together the fishermen and boatman keep alive a feature which is absolutely essential for the "real" businessmen to make money.

The boats may be dead already although they last for long ages individually. When people like P give up or fail to pass on the skills they safeguard, the boats will be dead even if several examples remain. Every one that is left to rot on a quay is more than just one less if no new ones can be built.

For these boats to survive an economic justification must sustain them. What is the number of new constructions per year needed to keep the craft of boat building alive? Is there a demand for such a number? If not how can demand be increased and sustained in a permanent manner? can the MTA, local councils, the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries and all other responsible get together and form a binding policy to sustain the traditional boats? They need more than rhetoric. if the republic of Malta claimed a right to royalties for the use of any picture containing a traditional boat even if it meant collecting a fraction of one cent per postcard, significant funds could be found. If sponsors could be found to build a large Speronara, the link between Malta and the outside world for many centuries, it could be Malta's roving ambassador in the Mediterranean. Perhaps we can persuade one of our more affluent citizens to commission the construction of one of them for use as his yacht. Perhaps others can be persuaded to use a fregatina as a tender. How about a race between traditional crafts rigged with sails? Would they not make a fine start event to the Middlesea Race and other major nautical events?

My jigsaw puzzle is still far from taking shape but meeting P has been a special boost. Now how to link him with the friends I made in Cyprus who built a classic warship, with other groups seeking to safeguard their own nautical traditions around the Mediterranean and beyond, with the Cottonera waterfront project and with the Grand Harbour regeneration idea? Do the people very slowly rebuilding a Gozo ferry in Mgarr want to play a part? How can I find the time to get this thing together? Who can help?

Having a dream is great. It is even better when you find that it is shared. Who else has a passion for sailing, for sailing history, for our traditional boats?

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