Passing the buck won’t cleanup the mess

Not so long ago a CTO official named Glafkos Kariolou, rightly, commented on the state of our beaches. His overall observation was that we have an embedded cultural issue which affects our behaviour when we visit the beach (and other parts of the island)… in a nutshell, we are ‘slobs’ who leave our garbage anywhere as long it’s not in our own backyard.

There was an item on one of CyBC’s lunchtime news programmes about the sewage turning up on Curium beach, an area which comes under the auspices of the British Sovereign Bases.

Our learned CyBC journalist (Paris Potamitis) seized the opportunity to do some more ‘Brit-bashing’, accusing them of polluting our magnificent beaches with their crap. Mr Kariolou told of how the CTO had asked the British authorities for an explanation in late July only to be told that the said pollution is likely to have been caused by a passing shipping that disposed of their waste in the sea.

The CTO insists that the waste is more likely to have been carried down the coast from the shore but whoever caused the problem isn’t really the issue; it was primarily a God-given opportunity to re-focus the microscope on the others, yet again, while ignoring our culpability.

Go to this web page for an overview of Cyprus garbage: http://dailytrash.fotopic.net/

Panayiotis Constanti,
Dherynia,

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.