Raphael Vassallo | Sunday, 15 February 2009

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Foundation and Empire

How strange. Part of me tells me I should be rejoicing at the news. But another part of me finds it vaguely disquieting.

This museum business, I mean: the one about the evil Cathedral Foundation and its nefarious plans to tunnel under and ultimately destroy St John’s… (and they would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for Princess Astrid and her pesky little Ewoks...)
Seen from this angle: well, damn right I should rejoice. Who in his right mind wouldn’t get a unique thrill of satisfaction, when a sinister coven of government and Church appointees is outwitted and defeated... by a handful of indignant Slimizi?
But something, somewhere doesn’t feel right.

The real reason I should be happy (or at least, be mightily relieved) is that deep down – or maybe quite close to the surface – I simply didn’t trust the Foundation not to make the mother of all ghastly cock-ups, and cause irreparable damage to either the Cathedral, its surroundings, or both. Not so much the individual members themselves: in fact I hardly knew the Foundation existed until this whole thing began. No, my distrust of the project had more to do with the proposal to excavate five storeys through a largely unexplored part of subterranean Valletta… and that the people doing the digging were unlikely to be the same ones sitting on the Foundation board in the first place.
Instead, they would be agents of the Empire – that sprawling, intergalactic conglomeration of contractors, sub-contractors, construction engineers and demi-demolitionists... who between them have already smashed our tiny country to smithereens.

Don’t know about you, but I have seen far, far too many cock-ups to seriously imagine that this project would have been any different. To begin with, there are all those grand projects that start out as one thing, but then – several years later and a few million euros beyond the original budget – lo and behold! They end up being something else entirely.
Examples? Take your pick: there’s the Mgarr Terminal project... which brusquely “terminated” Mgarr’s status as a quaint, idyllic and much-photographed Mediterranean port town; and more cogently still – seeing as it also involved one of the main backers of the St John’s museum project – there was the “underground” car-park in Floriana... which gave a whole new definition to the term “underground”, and is now the third most visible man-made construction from Space (the other two being the Dwejra Heritage Park Visitors’ Centre and the Great Wall of China.)

Then there are the million little things that invariably go wrong with architects’ well-laid plans. I have heard of development projects which got under way, only to stumble upon a series of subterranean caves – which were obviously destroyed even as they were being discovered – and find themselves radically redesigned in midstream, with or without re-applying for a MEPA permit.
OK, I admit I don’t have much experience in laying foundations for holiday complexes and such… but I would have thought that assessing the underlying geological formation of any stretch of land was more or less a given, if you also plan on carving a great big crater slap bang in the middle of it.
But no. The experts like to do things by the book, and the book on this occasion says: “Start digging, and when the first bulldozer disappears though a hole in the ground, then start worrying...”

That’s not to mention all the unforeseen consequences of construction work: the displacement of rainwater, so that densely populated areas suddenly find themselves in a flood plain; the 10-storey cranes, which keel over and collapse onto buildings because some idiot parked them with one set of tyres over a manhole; or how about the Nadur cemetery extension, which (as widely predicted) turned all the nearby farmers’ irrigation water a sickly shade of green…?
And on it goes. We could spend an entire lifetime comparing the sizes of our construction industry’s various and irreparable cock-ups... without even mentioning any of the fatal ones.

Anyone remember that house in Cathedral Street, Sliema? There one day, and gone the next? Well, not exactly gone: more like reduced to a pile of rubble... with its only occupant, an elderly lady, still inside.
Who takes responsibility when stuff like that happens, I wonder? Who took it in this particular case? Last I heard – which I admit was a while ago – the victim’s family was still battling for compensation. So I suppose the answers to questions 1 and 2 are “nobody” and “nobody”, roughly in that order.
Still in Siema – just up the road, in fact – there was also the miraculous incident of a medieval chapel, containing one or more Mattia Preti frescoes, which was cracked right down the middle while a band of merry contractors smashed their way past while doing trench works for a nearby hotel.
And yes, yes, I know Anglu Xuereb will write in to protest that the responsibility lies with the subcontractors; that he’s already paying for the chapel’s restoration; and that everyone’s persecuting him because of his hilarious stint in politics a while back…
But that only enforces the point: developers subcontract to third parties, who sub-sub-contract to fourth, fifth and sixth parties, who often as not hire illegal (or worse still, ill-tempered) workers... and no sooner does some priceless monument or other come crashing down about our ears, than... surprise! No one’s responsible.

Throw politics into the equation, and the whole thing starts looking like a Mel Brooks film. These are after all the same contractors who openly boast of making regular political contributions to both parties – with the occasional free ‘kontrabejt’ thrown in for good measure. So suddenly, by a huge coincidence, MEPA finds itself waiving that little EIA over there... fast-tracking this little application over here... closing an eye at that building height restriction over there… (if, that is, the same authority is not too busy approving a project three days before the vote is actually taken.)
And whenever someone tries enforcing a tiny, weeny little regulation – say, suspending electricity supply, until the developer pays an earlier incurred environmental fine – off the contractor goes, threatening to lay off his entire workforce, until… let there be light!

So I ask you: would you trust a board of professionals, no matter how well-intentioned, to go ahead and dig five storeys under St John’s... when you know the digging will be carried out by a troop of semi-literate baboons? Speaking entirely for myself, I wouldn’t, but… that’s the disquieting bit. For the above observations tell me far, far more about the local construction industry than they do about the museum project itself. Is it possible that this one might have been the exception? That it would have paved the way to a new way of doing construction work, like a certain someone once promised us a “new way of doing politics”?
I sincerely doubt it, but I am also aware of the implications. What are we suggesting here, exactly? No excavations in Valletta at all? Ever? Or anywhere else in Malta, for that matter? And then again: why?
Is it because Valletta is too precious for any drilling to take place? Or is it simply because our construction industry is too incompetent, too spoilt, too arrogant, too primitive and too damn barbaric to be trusted not to make a complete hash of things?

Still, I suppose there is a little poetic justice in all this. For now that the project has been derailed, and €14 million worth of EU funding irretrievably lost – not to mention the Prime Minister himself forced to intervene to avoid an almost inevitable parliamentary defeat – it seems that the architects of Malta’s intricate labyrinth of contactors have now fallen victim to the ill effects of their own greed.
Mistrust in the construction industry is now so deeply ingrained – quite rightly – that any future controversial project, EU funding or no EU funding, is virtually guaranteed to meet with similar or identical levels of resistance.
So are we going to have government intervention each and every time? And how long will Gonzi be able to weather this situation, while clinging to the reins of government by a single parliament... which happens to be occupied by Astrid’s own pin-up politician, JPO?

So allow me a word of advice, Dr Gonzi. Now would be a good time to embark on that promised MEPA reform... and while you’re at it, to pass that law on party financing. After all, what is needed here is a little injection of public confidence in the construction industry... so that maybe, just maybe, we might trust them to dig a hole in the ground, without precipitating the umpteenth environmental cataclysm.

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