Ink & Island: How Malta’s Letters to the Editor Still Shape a Nation in 2025

Letters to the editor – September 14, 2025
From the stone balconies of Valletta to the fishing nets of Marsaxlokk, Maltese ink still matters

By 7 a.m. on the third Sunday of September, the Times of Malta kiosk on Republic Street is already a miniature parliament. Retired teachers in linen shirts, bakers still dusted with flour, and teenagers clutching iced coffees queue for the weekend edition, but most turn first to the back page—today’s harvest of letters to the editor. In an age of 280-character hot takes, the island’s oldest democratic pulpit still commands 500 words and a civil tongue.

This week’s crop is vintage 2025: twenty-three letters, three in Maltese, one in Italian, all pulsing with the pre-autumn anxieties of a country caught between carnival and climate crisis. The hottest potato is the proposed “aqua-catamaran” ferry from Sliema to Gozo, a hydrogen-powered beast that promises 20-minute crossings but threatens to slice through the Comino snorkelling zone. Letter-writer Emanuel Zahra, 68, diver and retired headmaster from Xagħra, quotes the 1971 Nature Protection Act from memory and signs off with the traditional “Għalikem kollha” (“Yours to all”), a salutation that predates Facebook’s “Best” by two centuries.

Culture watchers say the letter page is Malta’s last truly bilingual public square. Linguist Dr. Lara Bugeja at the University of Malta points out that code-switching in letters—“Nirringrazzjakom, Mr Editor, for allowing dettall żgħir” (“a small detail”)—mirrors the way families argue over Sunday lunch: English for policy, Maltese for passion. The result is a living archive of idiom; last month a Gozitan farmer described over-development as “bħal ħobż biż-żejt mingħajr ħobż” (“like bread-with-oil without the bread”), a phrase now trending on TikTok as a hashtag against soulless apartments.

Editors guard the gate jealously. Deputy editor Mark Laurence Zammit says the paper receives roughly 120 letters weekly; only one in five makes print. “We fact-check every statistic, translate every proverb, and—crucially—call the writer to confirm they exist,” he laughs. The verification ritual is itself a social glue: elderly contributors who’ve never emailed are visited at home by young reporters bearing pastizzi, turning editorial duty into inter-generational diplomacy.

The community impact is measurable. When 14-year-old climate striker Leah Portelli from Żejtun wrote in July begging the Prime Minister to “leave us a shoreline older than your campaign posters,” the Environment Ministry’s Facebook reply garnered 3,200 angry emojis within an hour. Two weeks later, Robert Abela announced a moratorium on new beach concessions until 2027—small victory, big precedent.

Not every letter wins. But even the unpublished ones circulate in WhatsApp groups, parish bulletins, and band-club noticeboards, photocopied till the ink blurs. Fr. Joe Borg, who archives parish reactions at the Curia, calls the letter page “the yeast in the ftira dough of Maltese opinion; invisible, yet the whole thing rises because of it.”

As the church bells ring for the 10 a.m. Mass, the kiosk owner folds up the unsold stack. A tourist asks if the letters are “like Reddit, but on paper.” A local grandma retorts, “No, my love, Reddit is letters to the editor without the prayers.” Everyone laughs, and for a moment the digital and the limestone eras coexist under the September sun.

Conclusion
Whether debating ferry wakes or the price of goat cheese, Malta’s letter writers insist that democracy begins not in Brussels or TikTok trends, but in 400 carefully chosen words sent by post or typed on a nephew’s laptop. Long after the last fireworks fade from the village festa, those words remain, clipped to fridge doors, tucked inside missals, and archived in the national library—paper evidence that on a rock smaller than most cities, every voice can still command column inches and, occasionally, change policy. The letters to the editor, September 14, 2025, prove that in Malta, ink is the second-most precious liquid after olive oil, and both improve with age.