Isn`t This a Lovely Place

20^th February 2009
The Malta Independent - Friday Wisdom

Indeed it is! There is no country like it. While the world is economically falling apart, while currencies of East European countries, EU countries like Latvia, Hungary, and Poland among others, EU aspirants like Ukraine, or EU ‘not interested’ like Russia, are in a free fall on the world foreign exchange markets, while euro anchor members like Spain and Ireland are seeing their credit rating cut down and the cost of their credit insurance soaring as their risk of sovereign default is perceived more real than ever, we seem to be living in a world of our own.

What makes our headlines and what we waste our energy upon at this critical juncture is whether we should dig a quarry in the heart of Valletta to house better our national treasures, or whether the Opera House site should be restored to its original glory or should be re-developed to house our parliament.

While governments the world over are falling over themselves to launch fiscal stimulus packages to protect their economies from the grip of the recession and reverse its course to make it as shallow and short as possible, we seem content living in denial. We take no initiatives to keep our property market ticking, to render our tourism more competitive as products of competitors become instantly more price attractive as a result of the exchange rate turmoil going on, and we seem unconcerned about the real possibility of layoffs by manufacturing units as their order book gets shorter and shorter.

I give up, temporarily at least, so I write about the headline grabbers which are mere distractions from the real problems facing us.

The St John’s Co-Cathedral museum extension saga marks a landmark in the political evolution of this country. I don’t buy the eyewash that the project was scrapped by the government, merely a few hours before its fate was about to be decided in parliament, because the Archbishop convinced the Prime Minister that the project had become a matter of divisive controversy. I don’t even give it an ounce of probability that the government’s decision was motivated by respect to the public’s generally expressed bad taste for the project. The timing of the decision and the way it was announced leave little room for doubt that the government’s decision was solely motivated by fear that it could not count on the support of all its backbenchers in parliament and its one-seat majority was too fragile to risk a highly damaging humiliation.

I am not qualified enough to speak with any authority on the matter so I refrain from stating on which side of the argument I stood.

But what annoyed me greatly is the reaction of the main promoter of the project who joined his role as member of St John’s Co-Cathedral Foundation and Malta’s representative for the EU with a seat in the Cabinet, to push forward the project to high priority status. When acknowledging the inevitability of government’s decision he was reported saying “It is sad when decisions are not allowed to be taken by professionals.”

What poor regard for the working of democracy! This was not a case of some minister unilaterally over-ruling broad professional opinion. Does RCC truly believe that professionals should prevail over the whole body of the representatives of the people?

Here we had the prospect of parliament putting its weight against the project with the assistance of backbenchers from the government side departing from their whip discipline probably at the expense of their personal political career. I say this was an interesting evolution of modern parliamentary history as for the first time since I can remember, the government is no longer acting as a five-year dictatorship and neither is it surrendering its mandate as Labour did in 1998 because it could not continue the tradition of five-year dictatorship.

Here we have a case of healthy, desirable but rare separation between the roles of the legislative and the executive; a case of the government being forced to take the views of its backbenchers into the equation (views which hopefully reflect strong personal convictions and not mere jockeying for trading parliamentary loyalty for a better front row seat).

As to the right sort of development for the old theatre site, I have little sympathy for the nostalgia of those who prefer a perfect replica of Barry’s project. Neither do I fall in line with the view of those who argue that Valletta needs a cultural centre which must include a theatre even if we depart from Barry’s model. Such a cultural centre, needed as it is, need not be in the centre of Valletta and could well be in a more peripheral location with St Elmo, Baviere or Bighi across the Grand Harbour meriting serious consideration.

The theatre site must serve the daily needs of those who visit Valletta, not those who visit occasionally to watch an event happening in Valletta. Primarily it must be a teaser to whet the appetite for a return to the many thousands of cruise tourists who visit us for just a few hours. We need an exhibition to persuade them to return for a longer stay.

It should serve as a service point for customer service (NOT the full back office rigmarole) of all government entities to ensure that the citizen can get all services from its government from under one-roof without having to run like mad from one department to another. And if on top of these it can house parliament and its offices then that would a productive use for a prime site. Parliament is the primary exponent of democracy and its location in a prominent place in the capital city symbolises the importance of democracy for our development.

If we can create something in the spirit of Norman Foster’s Berlin Reichstag forming an attractive and distinctive mark in the skyline, Valletta could earn what it is ominously missing – a vantage point accessible to the public which gives a 360° view enjoying the magnificence of the Grand Harbour and Marsamxetto from one location.