Let's save holey Malta

Italian art and culture guru Vittorio Sgarbi is not known for his tact. I remember his violent reaction some years ago when the Commune di Firenze decided to repave and dig up Piazza della Signoria. Prof. Sgarbi called whoever was responsible "cretini ed ignoranti". My reaction to the news item about digging up Palace Square, or as it is less popularly known, St George's Square, to construct an underground car park was largely the same as Prof. Sgarbi's.

No sooner have the Maltese people won a significant victory about the St John's Foundation plans to dig a bunker when another is planned out. As if there were not enough holes in the road already. It seems as if nothing can be achieved in this country without digging a great big hole to do it.

The Sette Giugnio monument that unbalanced the square for so long is being temporarily removed, which is why the news item appeared for starters. The point is this. If Parliament is earmarked to move out of the Presidential Palace to a prestigious location that is not, please, repeat and read my lips, not the opera house site, therefore the need for a car park in what should be the heart of the city is completely negated. That is, of course, unless the MPs wish to retain their parking bays to continue patronising a well known and respected watering hole in their spare time!

With Park and Ride we do not need a parking lot under the Palace Square so, please, remove the present embarrassment and give it back to the people to enjoy without making a horlicks of it.

If we really wish Valletta to be Europe's cultural capital by 2018 we must get our act together and spruce it up big time. Our country cannot afford to have more architectural carbuncles and abominations than it has already. Irreversible damage has been caused by cockeyed decisions taken by largely past PN governments, the cherry on the cake being the present City Gate. Imagine any other European capital's entrance being a block of government apartments, courtesy of the Labour Party, that permanently lop-sides the square and which, by rights, should have been the WI of Valletta and not socially-assisted housing!

We really have got it all wrong, haven't we? As wrong as to place questionable bronzes about even more questionable events smack in the centre of Valletta while abandoning the most artistically valuable and significant to the periphery. Poor Vilhena is badly sited while the Attardi Aeneas is marooned in a grove of trees somewhere in the Lower Barrakka where most people are unaware of it.

The pundits are now lamenting that Mepa is rendered defunct because a precedent has been set by the St John's debacle that brought the issue to the point of it almost being roundly trounced in Parliament. If that is the case, it is entirely the fault of all those who tried to push it through willy-nilly despite the negative technical reports and the vociferous all round opposition to it. They have only themselves to blame.

By allowing things to go as far as they did, the government incumbents merely played into the hands of an astute and shrewd decision by the Leader of the Opposition to champion the objections when it seemed all else was lost and we were banging our heads against a brick wall.

We will never allow any government to get away with another City Gate type project. This is why the prospect of having a car park dug in the centre of Valletta is sheer lunacy for precisely the same reasons as why the St John's project was abandoned.

Despite Lawrence Gonzi's recent declaration about himself being the sole decision taker in the country which rather reminded me of Louis XIV's apocryphal "L'Etat, c'est moi!", it is we the people who are ultimately responsible for what is carried out in it as it is we the people who elect caretakers to represent us every five years who are at the end of the day answerable to us the people alone and not some obscure office in Brussels.