Houses like the one you mention are routinely sold and sold in a jiffy – there is a ready market for them, and there is no emotional investment in them either.

With large and historic family houses, there is no ready market and plenty of emotional investment.

Incidentally, another comment you posted seems to have disappeared when I hit the wrong button while replying, unless I am mistaken.

Astrid Villa is an insufferable busybody who is given too much space by the media.

In Malta, we have a lot of derelict historic properties precisely because they have statutory protection but the cost of repair/cost of any possible development far exceeds their potential market value. They are said to suffer from a conservation deficit and hence they’re left derelict, affecting the quality of the public realm in a negative way.

The scheduling of property or the designation of conservation areas should always be coupled with a grant system offered by the state or charities, precisely because there are bound to be properties with a conservation deficit. In Malta, unfortunately, we only see one side of the coin. We protect properties with cultural significance by legislation but we don’t offer help to ensure their adequate protection.

If you have a proper and complete system that ensures the protection of culturally significant buildings, which includes grant systems and the like to bridge conservation deficits, but you still have people who refuse to take care of their culturally significant property, the state should consider other means of protection. One of the options is compulsory purchase of expropriation. The price paid in such cases should take in consideration the cost of repair, precisely because even the state can’t demolish it or do as it pleases.

Having said this, compulsory purchase should always be considered after all others means of protection are explored.

How old are you, if you have been reading newspapers for only six years – 21?

Then I shall have to say ‘no wonder you think the way you do’.

You’re forgiven.

Once more, you do not stick to the point.

1. Property rights are not predicated on whether something is old and beautiful, but on ownership.

2. Cultural heritage is not predicated on whether something is on public view or not, but on historic relevance.

3. It is not the fact that buildings are on public view which makes them cultural heritage – if we are to assume cultural heritage – but their historic relevance.

4. The fact that something is on public view does not give the public rights over it, rights they do not have over ‘cultural heritage’ that is not on public view.

5. If the public has a vested interest in what becomes of somebody else’s building, it is because of their rights over their own neighbouring property, and not because of any rights they may assume in the property of others.

6. State interference with the property rights of individuals should begin and end on the principle of ‘your right to swing your fist ends where somebody’s nose begins’. An example: when exercising your right over your property adversely affects the rights of others. In this respect at least, we are saying the same thing, but for different reasons. You approach the matter from the fascist perspective, and I from the liberal.

7. A person should bloody well be allowed to let his property fall into ruin if that is what he wants to do (it’s nobody else’s business) except where it impacts on the property of others. You believe that a person should never be allowed to allow his property to fall into ruin if you consider it to be ‘common cultural heritage’, and not only where it impacts on the property of others. I don’t.

8. There are no laws to stop you hacking your 18th-century chest of drawers to pieces and using it for firewood if that pleases you. It’s nobody’s business and no one is going to interfere. Buildings are a different case only because you can see them out there in public and because what you do with them might impact on others. Where there is no impact on others, nobody has any right to interfere. This has nothing to do with the age or beauty of a building.

In most countries, the quality of the public realm is very high on the agenda. Buildings and buildings’ facades are considered everywhere else around the world as part of the public realm. Most people have pride in their public realm and make sure that their property contributes positively to it. Then there are laws and systems so that everyone else tows the line. This to ensure a pleasant public realm and to ensure that an individual’s property is not devalued because of the negligence and carelessness of his neighbour. In Malta, we do not understand this concept. All we see is ‘minn l-ghatba l-gewwa’.

Furniture, paintings, and jewellery can’t be considered as part of the public realm.

I said that a person’s property rights are not vested in the quality of the property but in his or her ownership of it, and that the public and the state do not participate in these property rights.

What are you going to suggest next – that people who own beautiful and valuable paintings should be forced to display them in museums?

People like Astrid Vella feel they somehow have vested ownership rights in other people’s buildings purely because they can see them out there on the street.

They do not make similar assumptions about magnificent furniture, jewellery, silver and paintings which they cannot see.

If you were a regular reader, you would know exactly what my views are on these matters because I have written about them often.

I am a liberal (in the British political, not American, meaning of the word). All else follows from there.

I cherish privacy, the rights of the individual and minimal state interference in matters which do not concern the state.

The matter of scheduling goes beyond property rights and I am not interested in having a debate about it here and now.

I have written about it several times over the years for my newspaper column.