Dolphins and Dolphins Only: Malta Won't Listen

Gabriel Fenech | News Beast by FreeMalta.com

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Twenty-nine organisations signed a letter this week, and nobody in government has answered it. That number — twenty-nine — matters more than the letter itself, because it tells you something about the state of civic life in Malta: the threshold for being ignored keeps rising, and the coalitions keep getting larger to compensate.

The subject is bottlenose dolphins. Specifically, the resident population that lives in Maltese waters and has been living there considerably longer than the recreational boat industry that now terrorises them for sport. The Times of Malta reports that businesses and environmental groups are warning, in terms that are not especially ambiguous, that repeated harassment by vessels is pushing these animals toward the edge of what a population can absorb. The coalition wants immediate action. They will probably get a press release.

I have a theory about why Malta cannot protect its own coastline. It is not ignorance — the science is clear, the behaviour is documented, the harm is not in dispute. The problem is that the sea, in the Maltese political imagination, has always been a resource to be extracted rather than a commons to be maintained. The Knights understood this. The British understood this. Every government since independence has understood this, and acted accordingly. The dolphins are simply the latest item on the invoice.

While that coalition waits for a response, the Malta Police Union is asking for something more immediately urgent: blood. An officer seriously injured in an incident that has sent a public appeal for type O-negative donations through official channels, according to The Malta Independent. If you can give, you should. The details are available through the Union directly. This is one of those stories where the commentary should be brief and the action should be immediate.

Elsewhere, the Nationalist Party is pressing on the power cuts, arguing through The Malta Independent that the outages are now measurably damaging the tourism sector — not as a theoretical risk, but as a present reality. The Federation of Accommodation Establishments, for its part, has joined calls for buildings and infrastructure to be redesigned for climate resilience, a position that sounds forward-thinking until you remember that the planning policies which produced Malta's current built environment were written by the same political class now expressing concern about it.

And eighteen organisations have called on Malta to back an EU ban on trade with illegal Israeli settlements, with a separate national law in support. The position is morally coherent. Whether it finds political traction depends on a government that has historically preferred the comfortable abstention to the principled vote.

Three separate coalitions, three separate appeals, three separate silences waiting to happen — the question is whether any of them break through before the summer ends and everyone goes back to pretending the problems are manageable.