Three separate stories broke around Gozo this week, and if you read them in sequence, a single uncomfortable picture assembles itself.
Momentum, the civil society group that has made a habit of asking the questions Malta's press used to ask before it got comfortable, has filed a Freedom of Information request demanding details on works being carried out in the valleys of Gozo. The Gozo Ministry, stung into response, issued a statement. That a ministry feels compelled to react publicly to an FOI request — rather than simply fulfilling it — tells you most of what you need to know about how transparency functions on this island. You don't scramble a press response when you have nothing to hide.
The works in question involve what has been described as "valley cleansing," which is one of those phrases that sounds benign until you ask who commissioned them, who is carrying them out, and what, precisely, they are clearing. Malta Today and The Malta Independent both covered the standoff, and neither publication has been given a satisfactory answer. Neither have I. My read: something was done quickly, without adequate documentation, in a protected natural area on an island that has almost no natural areas left to protect. I have been wrong before. I expect to be proven right.
Into this same Gozo conversation walks the Nationalist Party, which used the week to argue that the island needs more productive, private-sector, well-paid jobs. Alex Borg's party is not wrong about the diagnosis. Gozo has been used as a political stage prop for thirty years — every government promises it a ferry, a tunnel, a future, and delivers a former Labour MP as chair of the regional authority instead. That appointment — Abigail Camilleri, recently departed from parliament, now installed at the head of the Gozo Regional Authority — is the kind of move that requires no explanation and offers none. The revolving door between the parliamentary Labour group and the bodies that oversee public funds and public land is not a new door. It has simply never been rehung.
Meanwhile, in Rabat, a centuries-old Dominican cloister is partially collapsing and the friars are appealing for help. The Knights of St John built this island's identity in stone and mortar; we are watching it fall in real time while the cranes go up in Sliema. Nobody has announced an emergency allocation. Nobody will.
And in Valletta, on Merchant Street, a queue formed outside Bert's Takeaway for one last ftira before the shutters came down for good. Forty years of a family business, gone. The people in that queue understood something that no infrastructure report has ever managed to quantify: that when a city loses its institutions — the bakeries, the corner bars, the bakers who know your name — it does not become more modern. It becomes a postcard.
The Gozo valley investigation is still open, and Momentum has made clear it will not drop it.
Sophia Borg 
Alexandre Noir 
Dua Mifsud