Malta’s Letters to the Editor: The 11 September Edition That Has the Whole Island Talking

Letters to the Editor: The Maltese Pulse on 11 September 2025
By Luke Caruana, Hot Malta

The print edition of Times of Malta may land on doorsteps later than it used to, but the letters page still sparks faster than a July firework. This morning’s crop—19 missives in all—shows a nation wrestling with the same tension that has shaped the islands since the Knights: how to keep the doors open to the world without letting the house fall apart.

In a Sliema café, 71-year-old retired teacher Ġorġina Micallef is reading aloud to her friends. “Listen to this one,” she says, brandishing the paper like a baton. “‘Dear Sir, If one more three-storey rabbit hutch is approved in our village core, we’ll need a new word for “village”.’” The table erupts in laughter that quickly fades into nodding. The letter, signed “Disgusted, Żebbuġ”, sums up the summer’s planning rows: 432 new development permits issued in August alone, 87 % outside development zones. The ratio is becoming a national meme.

Over in Valletta, environmental architect Edward Falzon is drafting a reply before his first espresso cools. “We’ve reached peak absurdity,” he tells me, screen glowing with heritage overlays. “Yesterday a contractor told me he’s replacing wooden balconies with aluminium ‘because tourists won’t know the difference’. The letters page is the last line of defence when the Superintendence caves.” His own letter, already 400 words, argues that the 1987 UCA (Urban Conservation Area) boundaries must be frozen by emergency decree before the election campaign silences debate.

Yet not every envelope is dipped in bile. A handwritten note from Għarb, Gozo, thanks the unknown cyclist who returned a lost rabbit—“Floppy is our daughter’s whole universe”—and offers fig jam as reward. Editor-in-chief Herman Grech says these “micro-miracles” spike whenever the political temperature rises. “September always brings a harvest of anxiety: schools reopen, hotels empty, politicians return. Readers use the page as group therapy.”

The therapy is bilingual and multigenerational. A 14-year-old from St Aloysius writes in Maltese asking why buses still spew black smoke when lessons teach climate collapse. Below it, a 90-year-old war survivor responds in English, recalling 1942 convoys and praising her “courage hotter than the August tarmac”. The exchange racks up 1,200 Facebook shares within two hours, proof that the letters page has quietly become the islands’ most democratic social network.

Tourism, the golden goose that never stops honking, takes its usual bruises. A German couple applaud the new €2 harbour ferry day-pass but warn that “historic stairs won’t historic-lift themselves” for wheelchair users. Their letter prompts a reply from Transport Malta promising ramps “subject to heritage impact assessment”, bureaucratic poetry that generates 37 eye-roll emojis in the comments.

Perhaps the most poignant entry comes from a Maltese nurse in Manchester. She describes flying home for her nanna’s funeral and watching the island emerge through cloud “like a limestone heart still beating”. She begs compatriots to stop littering “because every crushed Cisk can on the beach is a small betrayal of exile”. The metaphor is so Maltese—Catholic, coastal, conflicted—that even the copy-editor admits to a “tiny weep”.

By noon, the newspaper’s website has logged 64,000 page views on the letters alone, dwarfing the sports section. The letters editor, a modest civil servant who insists on anonymity, says the secret is simple: “We publish the conversation people have in kitchen queues, not the press release they think we want.”

As the church bells strike six, the paper’s PDF is already circulating on WhatsApp groups named “Tal-Familja” and “Residents Against Noise”. In them, Maltese of every political shade screenshot sentences, annotate with red arrows, and argue about who loves Malta more. The platform may be new, but the ritual is medieval: a town-crier with a printing press, a parish square that stretches from Mellieħa to Marsaxlokk.

Tomorrow the cycle resets. But tonight, across balconies strung with laundry and LED festoons, the islands are talking to themselves—one letter at a time.