Comino Held the Mirror: Malta Looked Away

Colm Regan did not invent the argument — he just had the patience to write it down. His piece in the Times of Malta on the slow unravelling of Comino is the kind of op-ed that will be quietly filed away by the people who most need to read it. Comino, that speck of limestone between Malta and Gozo, has become something close to a parable: a place so small it cannot absorb the contradiction between what this country sells and what it actually has left to sell.

The de-growth argument is not new, but in Malta it remains politically radioactive. Every government since EU accession in 2004 has treated growth as self-evidently good — a moral position dressed up as an economic one. What Regan's analysis forces into the open is the compounding cost: when your island is three hundred and sixty square kilometres and your growth model depends on footfall, you eventually run out of island. Comino reached that point some years ago. Malta is simply choosing not to notice.

Meanwhile, at the law courts in Valletta, the trial of Yorgen Fenech entered another grinding phase as his lawyers cross-examined former police inspector Keith Arnaud. The Caruana Galizia murder case has been running so long that an entire generation of law students has grown up treating it as a permanent feature of Maltese public life. It is not. It will end. What it will leave behind — in terms of institutional accountability, or the lack of it — is the question that nobody in the political class seems eager to answer. The cross-examination of Arnaud is not theatre; it is the machinery of a justice system doing what justice systems are supposed to do, slowly and in full view.

In Gozo, a coalition of heritage and environmental groups has mounted serious opposition to a proposed industrial-scale solar farm on a protected hilltop in Żebbuġ. The tension here is genuine and not easily resolved: Malta has renewable energy obligations it has consistently underperformed, and somewhere, the panels have to go. But the choice of a protected hilltop suggests a planning logic that treats "green energy" as a magic phrase that dissolves all other considerations. It does not. A scarred Gozitan ridgeline is still a scarred ridgeline, regardless of what sits on top of it.

And at the db St George's Bay development, a small fire broke out at an outlet under construction in the shopping mall. Nobody was reported seriously hurt. The site has been a fixture of Maltese controversy for years — another receipt, as I have said before, for a transaction the island did not fully debate before signing. That it caught fire, however briefly, will strike some readers as metaphor. I will leave that to them.

The newly elected government has been in office long enough now that the MFOPD's call for concrete action on disability rights is no longer a grace-period request — it is the beginning of an accountability clock, and it has started ticking.