A public discussion at this time about the Maltese language – now and in the future – makes sense. One notes with great satisfaction how the need for the language to be cared for and given support, is being made intelligently and convincingly. It’s not being done by declaiming patrotic declarations as used to be done in the past, when perhaps they were what was required. Rather, the perspective being adopted today focuses on how a small society can continue to regenerate its own identity on the basis of having its own language, while accepting the importance of English in the “internal” and “external” life of its people.
What’s also important is how attention is being kept on the need for the written Maltese language to maintain its linkages to the grammatical roots from which it has issued in order for it to remain coherent. The claims that we should alter ortographic rules in a direction that would make it more easy to scribble fast inn Maltese, without any regard to maintain grammatical coherence, are populist and amount to an approach that would undermine the language’s contribution to our national identity. That at least is my judgement, even if I have frequently been accused of having, in what I wrote over the years, broken (inadvertently) many rules of correct spelling!
Government expenditures
It bears repeating. The way by which the government is managing to reduce its budget deficit is impressive. When set against the rules framed by the euro zone, no effective grounds arise for any criticism. The European Commission’s argument that over a medium term perspective, the rate by which changes to the budget deficit were happening should have been adjusted better is correct. In no way however does it negate the conclusion that what is being achieved goes beyond the obligations laid down by the euro zone to cover fiscal management.
Where more still needs to be discussed relates to the ever-increasing government expenditures. They are being excessively dedicated to recurrent items, not so much to real investment projects. This carries with it two problems – it is difficult to retrench on recurrent expenditure, it will go on increasing… without delivering much while encouraging consumption; and secondly, what will happen if for one reason or another, receipts begin to decline?
“Green” energy
The worries that the war in Iran has triggered, about how we could end up with fuel scarcities, might have unexpectedly boosted “green” energy technologies – like those which depend on sources that renew automatically – wind, sun…
Very often, reliance on such sources was considered as too onerous. Even people who were pushing for them admitted that using them had become indispensable only because of a deterioration in environmental and climatic conditions – but not everybody believed in its existence. How easier and cheaper it was to source fuel from countries which held underground huge stores of oil that could be delivered cheaply?!!
As of today, when oil trading is jammed by the blockades around the Hormuz Gulf, the threat is not just that the price of oil will explode, but that fuel deliveries will cease altogether. Meanwhile, the sources of “green” energy would have stayed available in all countries where the wind blows, the sun shines and waves beat against the shore…
