The biggest story in the news today
Victor Axiaq, the scientist who chairs the Environment and Resources Authority, and who sits on the Planning Authority board, had written a memo calling the environment impact assessment for the Gasan skyscraper in Sliema “a sham”.
Professor Axiaq was recovering from surgery when the Planning Authority board voted on the skyscraper last week, but gave this memo to another board member, the marine archaeologist Timmy Gambin, to read out on his behalf at the hearing before the vote.
Dr Gambin (declaration of interest: he is my childhood friend and Stella Maris parish, Sliema contemporary) chose not to read it out and did not justify his decision when The Sunday Times rang him about it. Instead he said: “Write what you like.” This has now created enormous controversy.
Read the story here in The Sunday Times.
Unfortunately, it has to be said that Timmy Gambin is a lifelong committed supporter of the Labour Party, which I have never been able to reconcile with his personality, character and rational mind.
Instead I have always put his unreasonable support for the Labour Party down to the fact that Patrick Holland, one of the most infamous ministers in Dom Mintoff’s cabinet – responsible for the requisition of hundreds of houses and flats for cronies and Mintoff supporters, including, incidentally, the house in Stella Maris Street where Dr Gambin grew up and lived into adulthood – was his mother’s brother. We always want to believe the best of our close relatives, however, no matter the deluge of evidence to the contrary.
The best I can say of Timmy Gambin’s inexplicable decision to vote in favour of the Gasan skyscraper and to conceal the contents of the memo which Professor Axiaq entrusted to him, is that at least he is not being a hypocrite by voting to harm Sliema and Sliema residents while he lives in comfort elsewhere. He still lives in the same house in the neighbourhood where we grew up – as does, incidentally, the architect of the skyscraper, Martin Xuereb, who lives round the corner, and whose wife’s family was also part and parcel of my years there. The Gasans themselves are from the same neighbourhood, too, which is how I know them from childhood – which all makes the destruction of our old town by its very people all the more sad.
At least some of us can do the little we can to fight against this skyscraper, which is so unnecessary, will cause harm to so many and benefit so few.
