Kenneth Zammit Tabona

In life one always hopes that the uncomfortable and inconvenient things that annoy us will disappear as soon as possible but must accept the fact that achieving it is easier said than done. The biggest blights in our collective lives as an island nation marooned as we are in the central Mediterranean; our isolationist mentality, our lack of democracy, our obliviousness to what is going on in the outside world , our short-sighted political strategies, our lemming-like way of reasoning and gullibility have, at last, brought the chickens home to roost.
The EU has served Malta with no fewer than seven major warnings most of which concern the environment. While the present government is preening itself over having produced the ideal pre-election budget like a rabbit out of a hat, we as a nation have had a formidable list of misdemeanours that will in the long run cost us pots of money unless they can be cleared.
This is not a task for the faint-hearted as environmental issues like those in the list will entail a fair amount of treading on people's toes. Each and every one of them is politically sensitive.
Take the ban on spring hunting for instance. The government, because of its pre-election pussyfooting, did not dare to put a stop to the whole-scale massacre that took place over the last six weeks despite the outcries. Even though the government knows that the vast majority would not like hunting to go on the way it does, it knows that there are very few people who will stick their necks out to stop it, apart from the Church and Kenneth Zammit Tabona, a journalist who has also commented time and again on the unsuitability of the air we breathe which is bugbear Number Two.

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..... even in sunny Malta where the people are the happiest in the world and where the yearly budget is the only effective weapon by which the electorate can be wooed into voting yet again for the party which will not upset the applecart and will ensure that Malta will continue to prosper according to electoral diktats and not according to what the country actually needs.
Meanwhile we will continue to happily inhale deadly PM10 particles, pay subsidies for our electricity, shudder in horror every time a fireworks factory is blasted off the earth, shrug as shot and wounded raptors fall in our fields along with shower after shower of lead pellets that make our food so tasty and so on... and on.