Monumental decision-making

I am never at my best at 7 a.m. and I had to give my eyes an extra rub to confirm that what I was reading in the article about City Gate (The Times Business, December 29) was not a figment of my imagination.

More than 63 years after the destruction of The Royal Opera House by the Luftwaffe bombers in April 1942 and some 15 years after Renzo Piano made his proposal, the Minister of Urban Development and Roads suddenly declares "we are now faced with the question of what to do with City Gate and will probably have to go back to square one". This will go down as one of the memorable quotes of 2005.

I do not wish to enter into the merits of Mr Piano's design and am not qualified to do so but I think it is a great pity that such an important person felt compelled to withdraw his design.

As the article points out, Mr Piano is one of the world's leading architects and designers and was awarded the Pritzker Prize, considered to be the architectural equivalent of a Nobel Prize. His designs grace many of the world's capital cities but it seems we, in our wisdom, think he is not good enough to design the entrance to Valletta!

In 1999, a government spokesman was quoted as having said: "City Gate is in such a pitiful state that we cannot have such a sight at the entrance to our capital city".

Then, at the beginning of 2000, we had Minister Francis Zammit Dimech stating that the consortium to be awarded the City Gate project would be selected by the beginning of the summer and that works would start by the end of that year! He added that Sir Cameron Mackintosh, of Cats and Phantom Of The Opera fame, and who has a Maltese mother, was interested in the theatre project. It is rather ironic that I should be writing about the redevelopment of the Royal Opera House. My grandfather, Turu Zammit Cutajar, formed part of the Royal Opera House Reconstruction Committee set up in 1952 under the chairmanship of the Prime Minister of the time, George Borg Olivier. At this breathtaking pace, I would not be surprised if my grandchildren will still be writing about the same subject in 20 years' time!

Parliament actually approved a project in October 1954 and plans were made for the laying of the foundation stone by the Duke of Edinburgh the following year.

A change of government put paid to these plans and the project was shelved. Ian Banks hit the nail on the head when he wrote in The Sunday Times in November 1962 that "bitter experience has taught us that successive governments, whatever their hue, have been apt, from time to time, to take this project from its shelf, dust it and put it back again". It sounds rather like our oil exploration saga but that is another story altogether.

I am also concerned by Minister Jesmond Mugliett's comment that the Opera House and City Gate projects would be handled separately. Why?

Is it because the government is hell bent on providing a new Parliament for our 65 honourable ladies and gentlemen? I was and remain highly critical of the expenditure of some Lm20 million on a new building when other less expensive options are available in Valletta.

Might I respectfully suggest to Mr Mugliett that he propose to his Cabinet colleagues that they make a final decision on the matter by the end of March 2006, failing which they make a supplementary vote of a couple of million liri for the clean-up and embellishment of the area until this monumental decision is finally made. Works on this cosmetic stop-gap measure could be completed by the end of 2006.