Malta’s Letters to the Editor Spark Nationwide Weekend of Coffee-Fuelled Debate

Letters to the editor – September 13, 2025
Valletta’s silent piazzas at dawn are usually broken only by the clatter of delivery vans and the bells of St John’s Co-Cathedral, but this week the city’s coffee shops are humming with a different sound: the rustle of newsprint and the low murmur of neighbours reading yesterday’s Times of Malta aloud. The reason? A single page that has managed to do what WhatsApp groups, village festa committees and even Eurovision night rarely achieve—get Maltese from every political hue talking to, not past, each other.

Under the old-fashioned heading “Letters to the Editor”, Friday’s edition carried nine submissions, ranging from a 92-year-old Gozitan widow lamenting the loss of quiet Sundays to a 19-year-old Junior College student demanding cheaper rent. By Saturday morning the letters had been screenshot, memed, debated on Lovin Malta’s Instagram stories and turned into a TikTok rap by the comedian “Tah-C”, whose rhyme “Minn Mellieħa sal-Port, il-kirjiet qed jaqbad il-qort” racked up 120k views in six hours. In a country where the average news cycle lasts the length of a pastizz and a half, the staying power of black ink on grey paper feels almost rebellious.

“Letters pages are Malta’s original Reddit thread,” says Dr Graziella Vella, media historian at the University of Malta. “Since the 1930s they’ve allowed islanders to air grievances without kissing the ring of some ħabib’s cousin. The difference now is that the grievances are existential—climate anxiety, over-tourism, AI replacing iGaming jobs—yet the tone still borrows from the village square: sarcastic, theatrical, instantly personal.”

Take letter-writer “Concerned Birżebbuġa Dad”, who complains that his twin boys can identify Ryanair fuselages by engine pitch but have never heard a corncrake. Or the woman from Sliema signing off as “Ex-Pat, Not Expired”, begging tourists to stop dabbing sunscreen on 400-year-old limestone. These are not policy white papers; they are postcards from a country shape-shifting faster than its balconies can flake.

Yet their impact is concrete. Last year a letter about garbage piled high at the Għadira nature reserve prompted a spontaneous 5 a.m. clean-up organised by bird-watchers and hunters—traditionally sworn enemies—who now share a WhatsApp group called “Nimxu Flimkien”. In July, a complaint that bus drivers were skipping the stop outside Mater Dei hospital led to a Times follow-up, a parliamentary question, and, within three weeks, a new shelter and clearer signage. As one transport official confessed off the record: “We can weather a Facebook storm, but when the Archbishop cites your letter in the Sunday homily, even the minister feels the heat.”

The cultural significance runs deeper. In an era when Maltese Facebook feeds are siloed by algorithmic tribe, the letters page remains stubbornly chronological: Nationalist, Labour, Green, abstentionist, all rubbing shoulders like passengers on the old Arriva buses. “It’s the last place you’ll see a hunter and an animal-rights activist share the same oxygen,” laughs Ramona Depares, editor of the Malta Independent’s weekend supplement. “We deliberately print them in the order they arrive, no favouritism. The randomness is the democracy.”

Back in Valletta, cafés report a 30 % spike in coffee sales on letter-days; baristas have started calling it “the Times bounce”. Tourists look bemused as locals translate the choicest insults—“qżieża mentali”, “ġaħan tal-ewwel klassi”—into English for them. Some visitors even ask for back-copies to take home, convinced they’ve stumbled on performance art rather than civic discourse.

By Monday the conversation will have moved on, no doubt, to some fresh scandal: a planning permit carved into ODZ land, or a TikTok chef deep-frying rabbit burgers. But for a brief weekend Malta slowed down, read slowly, argued loudly and—most radical of all—listened. In the margin of one letter, an 11-year-old girl scribbled in green biro: “Dear Editor, When I grow up I want to write like this.” Somewhere between the ink and the limestone, the island’s next love-letter to itself is already being drafted.