How do I prevent a Maven mojo parameter from being encoded on write to XML?

I'm writing a custom Maven plugin for building a Flatpak from a Java project. In a Maven mojo I understand we use @Parameter annotations to parse pom.xml file configurations. For example:

pom.xml:

<configuration> <param1>VALUE</param1> </configuration>

In MyMojo.java:

@Parameter private String param1;

But how would I set a value that includes HTML tags? For example:

<configuration> <param1><p>VALUE</p></param1> </configuration>

Trying this, I get the error:

Basic element 'param1' must not contain child elements.

So I wrap the <p>VALUE</p> in a CDATA block:

<configuration> <param1><![CDATA[<p>VALUE</p>]]></param1> </configuration>

This works up to the point where the MetaInfo object is written to file:

private void writeMetaInfo(MetaInfo metaInfo, Writer writer) throws IOException { XmlMapper mapper = new XmlMapper(); new PrintWriter(writer, true).println("<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>"); // metaInfo value is correct before writing - it has <p> not &lt;p> mapper.writerWithDefaultPrettyPrinter().writeValue(writer, metaInfo); }

The result is an XML file with: <param1>&lt;p>VALUE&lt;/p></param1>

...with the leading angle brackets replaced with their entity, &lt;. This doesn't work for the Flatpak MetaInfo file I'm building. It needs the <p> and </p>.

So it seems to be a problem with the XmlMapper.

I found this question which seems to indicate just using the CDATA block should work.

Any ideas?