Notes from a whacko island

Flimkien Ghal Ambjent Ahjar are insisting that attempts were made to keep the St John’s museum project hidden from ‘the people’. Astrid Vella is currently policing cyberspace to make sure that as many of ‘the people’ as humanly possible are apprised of this.

Yesterday, Mrs Vella posted this comment beneath the I. M. Beck column on the on-line version of The Times: “There was a full report says Bocca, but was it made public? All that has been brought to our attention so far is a single sentence in a 2006 Times article.” She failed to mention that this article was brought to their attention through the simple expedient of my having posted it on my blog. Shouldn’t she have been aware of it herself? “After that nothing has been traced,” she went on, arguing from silence. “Hardly what one would call public consultation as the foundation was obliged to undertake.”

And here Mrs Vella is being disingenuous again. Public consultation is an obligatory part of the process under which she and her cohorts have just put a rocket. Public consultation is part of the MEPA’s planning procedure. First the project proposer commissions an environmental impact assessment. The information contained in this environmental impact assessment is communicated to the public by means of advertised exhibitions, uploading of the entire EIA on a website and other public affairs initiatives and then, once the public is fully informed, it is invited to put forward its views, and those views are listened to.

Public consultation does not take place on the basis of rumour, gossip and misinformation, and it obviously cannot take place when there is no environmental impact assessment available yet. The FAA, however, fooled ‘the people’ – most of whom are unaware of the procedure – that an environmental impact assessment is available already (funny how no one asked to see it, but that’s Maltese journalism for you). The petition-signature request which I was sent several times by email, mainly by the offices of ‘Zminijietna, Voice of the Left’ (the defunct Communist Party) and by AD activists, contains the immortal line “the environmental impact assessment is already flawed”.

Mrs Vella continued, beneath I. M. Beck’s berating of her: “The architect’s correspondence to MEPA did not mention public consultation but pressed for speedy approval of the project which was applied for just before the national elections, i.e. when the public was otherwise distracted. The project was only brought to the public’s attention when FAA raised the issue. If the foundation was keen to publicise the project, why was the NGO presentation held at Din L-Art Helwa closed to the public and to most journalists?”

I found this remark of hers quite fascinating. Misinformation due to ignorance and confusion I can understand, even forgive. But this is tantamount to deliberately misleading the public on matters that the public does not understand and which Mrs Vella certainly does. When project proposers make presentations to NGOs, they can choose to meet these NGOs separately or all together. Din L-Art Helwa invariably receives a private presentation in acknowledgement of its status as Malta’s national trust. The project proposers go to Din L-Art Helwa. Din L-Art Helwa does not go to the project proposers. Din L-Art Helwa’s premises are private. They belong to Din L-Art Helwa. No project proposer, invited to Din L-Art Helwa’s offices to make a presentation, can or should invite other people along as well. This would be tantamount to being invited to somebody’s house for dinner and issuing an open invitation to friends, relatives and hangers-on to join you, at a house to which they had not been invited.

When project proposers make private presentations to NGOs, they are almost always closed to the press. This is not necessarily at the request of the project proposer. Most often, it is at the request of the NGO. At these meetings, people on both sides wish to be free to say what they please without the fear of being misquoted (or quoted) in the newspapers or the television news. NGOs at private presentations ask questions and make suggestions they might not wish to ask or make with a microphone under their nose. This is not about secrecy or about hiding things from the public. It is about thrashing things out before taking a public stance. Serious and credible NGOs communicate their view of a project to the public only after studying all the information and considering deeply the pros and cons. They do not, unlike Astrid Vella’s FAA, decide on the basis of a personal opinion, or worse, a personal grudge.

What people don’t know – because all the members of the foundation are gentlemen and won’t point out Mrs Vella’s failings despite her sustained assault on their integrity (imagine demanding the resignation of three monsignors) – is that Mrs Vella was invited for a tour of St John’s Cathedral, and a private visit to the museum, where she would have had the problems explained to her. She and her FAA were also invited at least twice – possibly three times – to the cathedral foundation’s offices, where they would have had the project explained to them in meticulous detail. Each time, Mrs Vella said she was too busy to take up the invitation.

When I first heard this, I thought that it couldn’t possibly be true. Astrid Vella is accusing the foundation of trying to hide the project and of presenting it only to Din L-Art Helwa, behind closed doors. Would she really have turned down a repeated invitation for a private presentation, a tour and a detailed explanation? It must be a lie, more malicious gossip. So I rang the curator, Cynthia de Giorgio, and put the question to her directly. Is it true that Astrid Vella was invited to the cathedral foundation offices for a private presentation on the project, at least twice, and that she refused to go, claiming that she was too busy? Is it true that she was offered a tour of the museum, a viewing of the tapestries, and an explanation of the current problems, and didn’t accept it? “Yes,” Mrs de Giorgio said. “It’s true. We invited her more than once for a presentation on the project and an explanation of the problems we are facing, and she didn’t accept.” “So what reason did she give you for not accepting your invitation?” “She said that she was too busy.”

The heroes of the Great Siege

There was something not quite right about the FAA’s over-emotive claim that the “heroes of the Great Siege”, who fought against the “infidel” and “defended Christianity in Europe” were buried in the churchyard at St John’s Cathedral. But I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Then a light-bulb went off. Of course, that was the source of my disquiet at this claim: St John’s Cathedral was built a good 13 years after the Great Siege. There is no way on earth that those who died during the siege could have been buried anywhere in St John’s. For a start, Valletta did not exist when the Great Siege took place. The decision to build the new city was taken after the siege. And the first church that the Order of St John used when Valletta was built was not St John’s, but Our Lady of Victory – the victory in the title being an express reference to the victory of 8 September 1565 – the foundation stone for which was laid in 1566. The Church of Our Lady of Victory was the very first building within Valletta.

The FAA might come back on this one and say that the ‘heroes of the Great Siege’ to which they referred were the ones who fought in the siege and then died after St John’s was built 13 years later, and ended up buried there. But I don’t think so. The way they sold it, to a largely uneducated public that somehow believes the Great Siege was fought from the city of Valletta – which didn’t exist yet – is that the cathedral churchyard is packed full of the fallen of 8 September 1565.

There is something else that should be said. In the Catholic tradition, and to a certain extent also within the Protestant tradition, dignitaries were buried not in the churchyard or the church grounds, but within the church itself, beneath the floor of the nave or in a crypt, or both. This was particularly the case with cathedrals. Burial in the grounds outside was for the poor or for those without particular status, and occurred only when there was no possibility, for whatever reason, of interment within the church or cathedral. As soon as the Bartolott Crypt at the cathedral was ready for use in 1604, there were no burials in the yard outside. All further burials took place in the crypt.

So what of the remains in the yard outside? I’m afraid to say that there are none. The yard was cleared by labourers working under the supervision of the architectural firm de Giorgio & Mortimer during the post-war reconstruction of badly bombed Valletta. The bones that were found were gathered together and removed, though it is not certain where to. So there is quite simply nothing there anymore.

Walking over graves

There was something else that bothered me about the FAA’s tugging on the emotions about this churchyard, and I realised at last what it was. One of their calls to arms was made on the basis that thousands of tourists would be walking all over the graves of heroes. How shocking, to walk over graves. Let’s leave aside the fact that there are no longer any graves in the yard, and consider this: every day, thousands of people march and trample over the graves within the cathedral, and the FAA says nothing about this ‘scandalous behaviour’. Yet walking over the presumed graves outside the cathedral is to be considered a desecration. Even before no tourists visited the cathedral, the Maltese congregation would amble across those graves in the cathedral nave and drag their chairs across them. They sat on top of the graves to hear mass.

My great fear is that, as I now realise it, Astrid Vella and the FAA do not know that each and every one of those beautiful marble slabs within the cathedral is a tombstone, covering a tomb over which thousands walk.