Malta’s Letters to the Editor Ignite National Soul-Searching on Heritage, Climate and Identity

**Letters to the Editor – September 16, 2025: The Pulse of Malta Speaks**

The letters page of any newspaper is often described as the nation’s diary, and this morning’s edition of the Times of Malta is no exception. As the island wakes to another golden September dawn, the voices of fishermen in Marsaxlokk, pensioners in Rabat, and TikTok activists in Sliema converge on page 14, forming a chorus that is by turns indignant, nostalgic, and wildly hopeful. In an age when 280-character tweets pass for debate, the sustained, ink-stained argument of a letter to the editor feels almost rebellious—an act of faith in the idea that words, carefully chosen and courageously signed, can still bend the archipelago’s trajectory.

Leading the pack is 72-year-old Ġorġ Zammit from Żebbuġ, whose lament over the “silent demolition of village cores” has already ricocheted across Facebook groups dedicated to Maltese heritage. Zammit attaches a 1974 black-and-white photograph of his hometown’s main square, shaded by a single carob tree; today the same frame is filled by four storeys of aluminium-and-glass flats. “We are not guarding our stonework,” he writes, “we are trading it for square metres.” Within two hours, the letter is screenshotted 1,300 times, tag-lined #SquareMetreShame. Culture Minister Owen Bonnici responds with a promise to “accelerate the urban-conservation audit,” but Zammit’s neighbours are sceptical; after all, similar pledges were made in 2018, 2021, and 2023.

Countering the elegiac tone, 19-year-old University student Leila Hassan argues that Malta’s future lies not in “mummifying façades” but in rooftop gardens and subsidised solar skins. Her letter, peppered with references to Copenhagen and Singapore, proposes a “Green Roofs Ordinance” requiring new buildings to allocate 30 % of horizontal surfaces to vegetation. Hassan’s digital-native generation rallies behind her; by midday a petition on Malta’s favourite activist portal has gathered 4,700 signatures, forcing a junior government MP to schedule a Twitter Space on “climate-responsive architecture”.

Perhaps the most visceral entry comes from fisherman Nardu Camilleri, who writes from the deck of his luzzu rocking gently in Marsaxlokk harbour. Camilleri describes how last week’s sudden storm, intensified by rising sea temperatures, snapped three of his lobster pots and left him €400 poorer. “The sea is angry,” he warns, linking the incident to the government’s recent oil-exploration concessions. His dialect-rich Maltese—“il-baħar qed jgħajjat lura”—is rendered in italics, a linguistic flourish that reminds urban readers the sea is not merely a postcard backdrop but a workplace, a larder, a relative.

Equally charged is the debate over the proposed Gozo helipad. Retired teacher Maria Farrugia, 68, recalls 1970s excursions when “the ferry was part of the adventure,” while boutique-hotel owner Reuben Grech insists helicopter connectivity will “unlock Gozo’s MICE potential” (Meetings, Incentives, Conferences, Exhibitions). The letters oscillate between pastoral nostalgia and venture-capital optimism, reflecting an island caught between its rural DNA and its LinkedIn aspirations.

Yet not every contribution is polemical. Eighty-one-year-old Sister Dolores sends a gentle thank-you to the teenagers who, unasked, painted the convent’s wrought-iron fence in Balzan. “Your kindness,” she writes, “was a soft rain on a thirsty soil.” The sentence is clipped and pasted into Instagram stories by influencers normally focused on brunch aesthetics, momentarily flooding the platform with sepia-toned images of nuns and dripping bougainvillea.

By evening, the letters page has become a national barometer. Radio talk-shots replay Ġorġ’s lament; PN leader Bernard Grech quotes Leila in a climate tweet; a restaurateur in Spinola Bay reprints Sister Dolores’s paragraph on table talkers. In a country of 520,000, the ripple effect is immediate: the architect next door quietly shelves plans for a third floor; a secondary-school teacher sets a homework assignment—“Write a letter to the editor about the Malta you want in 2040.”

Tomorrow the cycle will begin anew, but today the island has spoken to itself, in ink that smudges fingers and hearts alike. And that, more than any budget speech or policy paper, is how Malta remembers who it is—and decides who it wants to become.