Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1333591
Strange, isn't it, that the local roads minister would take all the flak for slowly turning Malta into one, giant metropolitan turn-pike, while the European Commission – which not only approved the strategic plan, but also financed up to 75% of it – doesn't even get criticised at all? 12 maltatoday | WEDNESDAY • 27 JANUARY 2021 OPINION AROUND 20 years ago, I remember read- ing an interview somewhere with The Pix- ies' bassist Kim Deal. At the time, I was more interested in details like how she came up with the riff of 'Gigantic' (her only credited song-writing effort with that band) or why, exactly, The Pixies split up when they did… But part of the interview was also about heroin addiction and how – in her own ex- perience – it affects people in more ways than just the obvious. In Kim's case, it affected her travelling pat- terns (and, consequently, the band's tour- ing schedule). She would consciously try to avoid places where she didn't already have a dealer in the neighbourhood or, at mini- mum, know where to find one at short no- tice. And there were other examples… all of which amounted to roughly the same thing: helplessness. In her own words, addiction reduces you to the equivalent of 'an old grandma'… una- ble to do anything at all, without automati- cally reaching for the meds in your handbag. I imagine it's no coincidence that a similar sentiment also underpins Robert Palmer's 'Addicted To Love': 'You can't sleep, you can't eat […] your will is not your own…". And you'll find echoes of it in lots of other songs about addiction, too, like The Eagles' 'Hotel California'… where 'you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave…' Coupled with another lyric from the same song – 'We are all just prisoners here, of our own device' – it captures both the inability to ever actually do anything; and the inabili- ty to take any decisions of one's own. And the addiction doesn't have to be to drugs, alcohol or love, either. Take Malta's addiction to EU funds, for instance. Just last week, it was reported that Malta now has to scramble to change its entire national ener- gy strategy because the EU decided to with- hold funding for the Malta-Italy gas pipeline project. To quote from the article: "In 2019, Malta's attempt to get finance for the €400 million pipeline was punished by the EC's de-prior- itisation of gas projects to move fast on cli- mate change targets. […] Now that it has lost out on the last disbursement of the €23 bil- lion CEF founds, Malta will have to change tack on its energy plans because the next PCI list in 2021 – the fifth – will be more stringent on gas projects. This means it will have to go for a hydrogen-ready system, so the proposed pipeline will have to be able to transport hydrogen…" Already, both the 'dependency' and the 'helplessness' are clearly visible. Meanwhile, there are also those other projects which did go ahead, precisely (and arguably only) be- cause of EU funding. Infrastructure Minister Ian Borg, for in- stance, was recently interviewed by Reno Bugeja on this newspaper's portal: and he twice took the opportunity to repeat some- thing he had announced as long ago as 2018, i.e. that "European funds […] will be partially financing the infrastructural projects of the Marsa-Ħamrun Bypass, the Marsa Junction Project, Buqana Road, the Central Link Pro- ject and the Santa Luċija tunnels…." Given the criticism that was (and still is) levelled at some of those projects, you can see why Borg would have been keen to re- mind us of all of that fact today. Strange, isn't it, that the local roads minister would take all the flak for slowly turning Malta into one, giant metropolitan turn-pike, while the European Commission – which not only ap- proved the strategic plan, but also financed up to 75% of it – doesn't even get criticised at all? But such, I suppose, is the unfairness of life. The question I would be asking (if I were Ian Borg) is: would any of those projects even have been contemplated at all, were it not for our insatiable appetite for freebies from Brussels? And would we have been capa- ble of financing projects of that magnitude, without the largesse of hundreds of millions of euros in European funding? Clearly, the answer is 'no' and 'no' respec- tively. And there you have it: 'No EU fund- ing, no project.' That is why at least three of those roadworks projects have already been finalised – the Santa Lucija Tunnels just last Sunday – yet plans for a gas pipeline to Sic- ily have had to be scrapped altogether, to be replaced with hurried preparations for a whole new energy strategy that must be finalised by later this year without, it must be said, any guarantee that the EU funds will actually be forthcoming, even then. We are, in a nutshell, left dangling from a string. Oh, and please note that we no longer even have the luxury of choosing our own means of powering up the country, either. No, siree, 'He who pays the piper calls the tune' and in this case, the European Com- mission gets to decide whether we go for gas or hydrogen (with no other options even considered, it seems). Even if, by its own admission, its "sustainability assessment of candidate gas projects had been 'suboptimal due to a lack of data'…" As you can see, then, it only takes a little tweaking to Robert Palmer's lyrics, to make them entirely applicable to this very scenar- io. 'You can't lay down gas pipelines to Sicily; you can't build roads… your national budget is not your own…' Might as well face it, folks, we can't do an- ything, as a nation, without a regular shot of European money pumped into our veins like an opiate. And yet – though it already feels like another age – it wasn't that way at all until just a few years ago. Sticking only to the energy sector: Malta somehow managed to finance, and build, two entire power stations from scratch, be- tween the 1950s and the late 1980s, both times when the economy was in no way comparable to what it is today (with or with- out EU funds). In the 1970s, we embarked on a nation- al project to build reverse-osmosis plants around the coast, and to this day, RO still provides the bulk of our daily water needs. We managed all this, and more, without a single centime in European Union funding though there were (and still are) alternative sources of finance, naturally. And yes, we indebted ourselves quite considerably on some (but not all) of those projects, too. All the same, however: embarking on na- tional infrastructure projects used to be considered 'doable', back in the days before we got so used to bringing out the beg- ging-bowls in Brussels. Now, the simple fact that Brussels says 'No', automatically means it cannot be done… at all. How, exactly, did we manage to get our- selves into such a humiliating position? For that's what addiction is, too… on top of everything else, naturally. It is also humili- ating to reduce your body to something so utterly helpless and dependent; and by all accounts, drug addicts do end up doing very humiliating things, in desperation for their next fix. Admittedly, 'changing their national ener- gy strategy' might not be one of them. Nor would 'embarking on humungous road-im- provement projects'… at a time when we should be trying to reduce vehicular traffic, instead of increasing it. But for a nation state to do such a dras- tic thing, at such short notice… simply be- cause, on a whim, the Commission decided to stop dangling its carrot before its greedy, salivating snout… I don't know. It smacks just a little too much of 'desperation', to me. And that's before looking at the enormity of the demand itself. Hydrogen. Nothing against the most abundant element in the universe, of course… but if the EU is sud- denly going to get all 'picky' on us in 2021 (though it wasn't anywhere near as fastidi- ous back in 2008, when approving the plans for a heavy-fuel power station…) why hy- drogen, exactly? Why not, say, solar or wind (or a combination of both): which are not only just as abundant… but, in fact, limit- less? And if they must insist (however arbitrari- ly) on a 'hydrogen-ready system'… why not also allow a transitional period, as, after all, it had done between heavy fuel oil and gas? So that maybe the infrastructure we already have in place, might actually remain usable for at least a couple more years? But that, I suppose, is also why it is so unwise to allow oneself to get addicted to things in the first place. Those are all con- siderations that matter to the Maltese gov- ernment, not to the European Commission. And – as should be more than obvious, by now – the Commission takes decisions on the basis of its own concerns, not ours. This is, in fact, part of what we bargain away, each time we cede more national de- cisions in exchange for a quick shot of cash. And it's the same sentiment that underpins all those rock anthems about addiction, too: 'Our will is not our own'; 'We are all just prisoners here, of (in this case), someone else's device…' Might as well face it, we're addicted to EU funds Raphael Vassallo