If they want to clean up Paceville, they should start by removing the sex clubs

The government’s ‘master plan’ for Paceville has been incredibly contentious. People are set to lose their homes, land-owners to lose their land, and opportunists like Silvio ‘Seabank’ Debono, who is already taking deposits for flats which haven’t been built on the Institute of Tourism Studies site which he hasn’t yet bought for €6 million, may have part of the land he hasn’t yet bought for considerably less than it’s worth expropriated for around €128 million, making Mark Gaffarena’s shifty deal look like chickenfeed.

The plan drawn up by British consultants Mott Macdonald, who had worked already for the shady Joseph Portelli who plans to build a skyscraper up the road there, speaks of “view corridors” and “pedestrian zones” and “public walkways” and much else in the same vein, decorating it all with computer graphics of preppy middle-aged couples walking arm in arm beneath trees next to cafes.

And caught up in the very understandable trauma of expropriation of private land, of ‘view corridors’ that necessitate the demolition of blocks of flats – Chinese-totalitarianism-style – we overlook the obvious. If the government were really serious about cleaning up Paceville and making it a civilised and pleasant place to be, it would start with the far simpler and more cost-effective expedient of getting rid of the sex clubs, the lap-dancing clubs, the glorified brothels, and Hugo Chetcuti’s sex hotel, with its wobbly beds and its mirrors on the ceiling, which ED ZL, the Tourism Minister, declared officially open in the notorious Chetcuti’s presence.

But that’s not going to happen, is it? The criminal underworld has too many vested interests in Paceville, and to make matters worse, Manuel Mallia, long-serving legal counsel to the Paceville Operators Association, is back in the cabinet of government. And what’s more, he’s now put nightclub owner Mark Grima on the state payroll as his communications coordinator. Grima’s father, the octogenarian Joe, who is confined by extreme over-eating to a wheelchair, is the Prime Minister’s special envoy for tourism.

So if we are to believe this non-starter of a master plan for Paceville, the government is planning to shell out around €500 million in expropriation payments, sequester the private property of those who don’t want it sequestered even if they are forcibly paid for it, and yet leave the sleaze operations right where they are, which means those preppily-dressed couples won’t be walking past cafes but past something else with Hugo Chetcuti’s name and/or face on it, and a bunch of dives in which imported women – I won’t say trafficked, but it’s closer to the mark – take off their clothes so that fat and ugly Maltese men can feel important and modern, when what they are is throw-backs to the Soho of 60 years ago.