Many towns and villages are endowed with two rival band clubs. They compete with bigger events, louder fireworks, darker music, brighter colours and flappier flags. They also compete to survive, because the business of festas is expensive.

Over decades, the more sensible band clubs put aside some of the money they raised every year and spent less on fireworks and statues to pay off the mortgages on their club houses. It mattered to them that the outsized palaces they inhabited became their legacies for future generations of brass band aficionados.

Their rivals were less focused on brick and mortar and spent the money they raised on the ephemeral indulgences of the yearly festa. Until a series of court decisions about the rights of the owners of their club houses meant they could be evicted at a moment’s notice and would have to organise their fund-raising parties inside their homes.

The government stepped in to save the day. Band clubs are an intrinsic part of Maltese culture, ministers patronisingly told us, and annoying details like the landlords’ fundamental right to the enjoyment of their property were not going to be allowed to get in the way of pre-election photo-ops of said ministers kissing babies on festa eve. It wasn’t that hard for ministers to come up with a solution. What’s a few million euros – scratch that. What’s several million euros of public funds to keep band club committees happy?

So, ministers quite literally purchased prime real estate, proper palaces in major town and village cores and – also quite literally – gifted that formerly private property to committees of associations of fans of a very specific genre of music.

That’s very generous, no doubt. But is it fair? You don’t have to take a fiscally conservative small-government stance to wonder about the wisdom of government interference in a straightforward dispute between a landlord and a tenant. Is it sustainable for the government to step in with public funds every time the courts apply the law and rule that the landlord is entitled to evict a tenant?

Probably not. There are cogent reasons why that is not what ordinarily happens. The government does not buy the building when a restaurant operator cannot afford to pay the rent. An evicted restaurant operator is not gifted a building by the authorities as a reward for their business closing down. The authorities allow for the restaurant to close down and for the owner of the building to recover their asset.

Even for residential housing, the government only regulates to ensure basic protections against homelessness. If a tenant can’t afford to pay the rent however, their apartment is not purchased by the government to be gifted to them.

We don’t do that because, though we may agree that the state should guarantee people’s right to a home and should also support expressions of popular culture, the way to do those things is through schemes that are fair, equally available to anyone meeting the same conditions and proportionate to the resources available to the state.

The case of the band clubs is neither fair nor proportionate. There are several other movements of popular culture that have not been gifted properties worth millions of euros by the state but who are at least just as deserving. Why are oompah bands better entitled to public funding on this scale than garage bands, jazz trios, baroque quartets and musical archaeologists of traditional instruments?

And why are music and fireworks organisations more eligible to be gifted real estate by the state than charities promoting other forms of cultural expression, or sports, or conservation, or politics of social justice and the protection of human rights?

Buying band clubs is wasteful, unfair and unsustainable- Manuel Delia

Why are the publicly funded properties of village band clubs manifestly more flamboyant, lavish and wastefully large than town halls, police stations and public health clinics? Why are the alcohol-serving bars and the money-making restaurants of publicly funded band clubs better resourced than the local elementary school? Why are the used-but-once-a-year theatres inside publicly funded band clubs in a better state of repair than the decrepit and falling-to-bits public school halls?

If our government is going to spend several million euros in village cores, why should the discretion on how to spend the money be handed to a committee of festa fanatics rather than to elected local councillors who are accountable to all residents no matter where they stand on the esoteric rivalries between saints and statues? Why should the millions be spent to free up funding for festas instead of directing them to some other village priority, such as social cohesion, migrant integration, or homelessness? Why should the minister decide on village priorities instead of locally elected councils?

Not even festa fans think this is fair. Ministers are now getting loud complaints from band clubs operated by generations of the more diligent committees who spent less on fireworks over time to pay off their mortgages and buy their club houses from their original owners. They are complaining that, by gifting their rival clubs’ houses to their profligate rivals, the government is rewarding their irresponsible financial mismanagement.

So now the clubs, which already own their palaces without the need of the government’s generosity, are insisting they are compensated with equivalent eye-watering sums of money so that a level playing field is maintained between rival band clubs. And they’re frantically trying to think what they could spend millions on if not to buy a palace they already own. It isn’t better schools or health clinics or police stations they’re asking for. They want money for what matters to them: bigger events, louder fireworks, darker music, brighter colours and flappier flags.

I don’t have anything against oompah band clubs, though this article will suggest to them that I do. God knows I don’t have anything against restaurants. I just don’t want my government spending tax money on subsidising restaurants, sad as I am every time a favourite restaurant of mine is forced to close down because it can’t afford to pay the rent.

It would have been sad to see band clubs evicted from the properties they used for their business, such as it is. God knows I’d rather their flamboyant flags over seeing those properties transformed into more soulless blocks of apartments any day of the week.

I just can’t see how direct state intervention is a solution. Because we clearly do not have the luxury to be spending this sort of money on a very narrow area of cultural interest and do so while keeping it fair with other areas of cultural interest. Let alone the weird choice of prioritising big band club houses over adequate delivery of the core business of local government: education, health, policing and properly funded local administration.

The band-club-house-buying scheme is nothing short of embezzlement of taxpayers’ money, raised ostensibly for public purposes but siphoned off instead to fund a manifestly private interest. It is wasteful, unfair and unsustainable. And it creates a new entitlement we clearly can’t afford to meet. This we have paid for another inane photo-op for a baby-kissing minister desperately seeking re-election.