The forgotten Maltese are not few in number. They rarely feature in the narrative of events in this country during the centuries running from the sixteenth to the beginning of the twentieth. Only one “managed” to evade this destiny – Manwel Dimech, although today, he has again become a subject that attracts very much a minority interest.

Meanwhile other personalities like Girolamo Barbara and Giorgio Mitrovich from different centuries rarely get referenced – in reality, they have been forgotten. And others with them – like for instance, the leaders of the Maltese on both sides of the confrontation with the French authorities in the wake of the departure of the Knights of St John.

Then the irony also is that one of the major monuments in the city of Valletta is the memorial to the British governor Alexander Ball in the Upper Barracca Gardens, built with financial contributions made by the Maltese themselves… or so it was said when it was being built.

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AGRICULTURE

Officially, it’s doing well… or at least, it’s not doing badly. It has become increasingly dependent on part-time work. It is still producing “enough” greens to satisfy a not tiny part of local demand. A range of open or hidden subsidies sustain the income of farmers and herdsmen but competition from Europe is still hurting.

The fact that the latest Economic Survey hardly had anything to say about agriculture is the strongest indicator of how marginal the sector has become. From the Survey we get to know that the share of agriculture in the annual economic growth for this year was 0.1  of a percentage point! The longest references to farming made in the Survey relate to the sector’s impact on climate warming – obviously an important topic, but again even in this context, quite marginal. It remains a great pity that agriculture has continued to lose the importance and attention it deserves.

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QUARTER OF A CENTURY

One cannot but agree with people who argue that in and of themselves, the beginning and end of a year, of a decade, of a century have no particular historical significance. They are simply a “mathematical” measure of the passage of time. The historical significance of any period does not arise from dates in the “abstract”, but from the pressure of events in the life of a nation (or the history of humanity) that occur during a given period – developments which do not choose to begin or fade out according to a timetable set by the calendar.

On the other hand, the calendar provides a perspective by way of setting a timescale which does on occasions, have a real meaning for those who are living developments in the “present tense”. For instance consider the first quarter of the present century which we will be ending in a few days. During the last twenty-five years, a sequence of events developed which changed the world’s human and political environment radically and at a deadly pace. There was the terrorist attack on New York’s Twin Towers, with the “war on terror” which followed. The financial crash starting 2008. The terrorist attacks in Europe. The Covid pandemic. The wars in the Ukraine and the Middle East. Climate warming. The realignment between the Superpowers and the larger powers… And all this against the backdrop of a fraying globalisation and powerful technological breakthoughs. It was a quarter of a century charged with tremendous changes that ushered back a political language that could lead to another world war.

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