Simple things are hard to understand, it seems

I hate it when women take up space in public life only to confirm the views of chauvinists that public life is not for women because women are incapable of preparing themselves, learning the facts or grasping simple notions as only men can.

Now here’s Astrid Vella again (like Paul Vincenti of Gift of Life, she pops up after the summer break) causing maximum damage on Facebook.

The funds that were ‘earmarked’ for the St John’s Cathedral Museum, she tells her Facebook friends, should be ‘diverted’ henceforth to repair and restore Fort St Angelo.

One year down the line and Mrs Vella still hasn’t taken on board the information that there are no such funds. There was an application for project funding, and that application was approved. When the application was withdrawn – famously – so was the funding.

There are no monies sitting around in a bank account waiting for disbursement as and how Mrs Vella, or anyone else for that matter, deems fit.

To obtain that sort of funding for the restoration of Fort St Angelo, an entire team of people will have to sit down, write a project proposal (a thoroughly complicated business), produce a tonne of papers and details and apply to the right place at the correct time. And then wait for approval, which may or may not be granted.

The European Union may be quite cavalier with expenses, but when it comes to handing over millions in taxpayers’ money for a single project like this, it doesn’t do so without a phalanx of cast-iron guarantees and an arduous nightmare of nitpicking assessments.

If Mrs Vella were to demand that such a project proposal be researched and written and an application made to the relevant EU body for funding, then she would be correct and I would be right behind her.

But demanding the transfer of funds that don’t exist from one project that has ceased to exist to another project that never existed makes her look like a damned silly woman who has trouble understanding procedures and technicalities (which is clearly not the case given her familiarity with the ins and outs of planning regulations). And that’s just more grist to the chauvinists’ mill.

I hope there’s going to be rather less of this Violet Elizabeth Bott behaviour in the long winter ahead.