Roamer's column

Whoa! Astrid. Still like you, but you went a scream too high over the outline applications submitted to the Malta Environment and Planning Authority last January for an underground extension to the St John's Co-Cathedral museum, which will have absolutely no effect on the cityscape, and another, which was not very well explained at the time, above ground. I think the underground project is the most exciting thing to happen to Valletta and to the Co-Cathedral, since the eponymous founder of our capital laid the city's foundation stone in 1565.

Nobody who has followed what has been happening over the past two decades can fail to realise just how much has been done, is being done, to restore, I would go as far as to say transform, St John's, from what it was like a mere 30 years ago when it was almost a monument in desuetude.

Last year, the number of visitors to the Co-Cathedral exceeded the population of Malta and Gozo. They go there to gape and gawk and marvel at the Mattia Preti ceiling, the magnificent baroque interior, Mazzuoli's Baptism of Christ and his Monument to Ramon Perellos, Domenico Guidi's Monument to Nicolas Cottoner - but I would need the rest of this year's column space to list all there is to be seen.

Away from its worshipping centre - the place is before all else the House of God - in storage or displayed in restricted spaces, there is the largest single collection of 17th century tapestries woven on designs by Peter Paul Rubens (the foundation launched a €1.5 million project in 2006 to have them restored), sacred vestments donated by Grand Masters Cottoner, Lascaris, Wignacourt and Pinto de Fonseca, 19 illuminated choral books dating back from 1533 to 1636, a picture gallery, a silver collection, relics and reliquaries and the 12-metre-high Cappella Ardente (1726). And there's the rub. What do you do to show these off to best advantage? Extend.

The proposed extension will allow the Rubens tapestries to be displayed as a complete set in what a foundation press statement referred to as 'an appropriate and controlled environment'. It will also create space for priceless collections and treasures that at present we cannot see at all; they are either stored away or hidden from view, which makes their conservation problematic and the aesthetic deficit intolerable. It would be scandalous not to extend.

The situation, thanks to the foundation's successful and ongoing rehabilitation of this city gem over the years, is untenable. Not only is it difficult to handle the daily traffic - more than 4,000 visitors flow through the place each day. The museum has neither the capacity nor the facilities to cope, still less to be home to artefacts of significant artistic and cultural distinction. Extension there has to be.

The underground plan, provided it is subjected to the most rigorous examination that must have as its priority the safety of the Cathedral itself, is to my mind a marvellous concept. Obviously, every expert and his dog need to be brought into the planning and pre-development stage, professional international help sought and a thorough examination carried out to ensure that the chances of disturbing the building itself are nil to the nth. In fact, the foundation has let it be known an independent environmental assessment will be carried out to make sure that there will be no risk to the Co-Cathedral or adjacent buildings.

There has been an outcry over what this intervention will mean to the sewer system built at the time of the Knights; nothing, I imagine, except for the rats and the flotsam that sewers are heir to. I cannot believe that an underground excavation development could possibly be flushed out by Mepa merely to retain a sewer.

The foundation is deeply conscious of the staggering and imaginative enormity of this project. St John's is in good hands. Lay off, Astrid.

Infirm structures

Somebody Down Here, or Up There for that matter, does not like the anointed Joseph Muscat. Else how could Labour Party delegates vote Jason Micallef back into the general secretary's office? So unreasonable was this decision, the answer, for all that it appears easy to arrive at, is difficult to work out.

Two telling facts, first. The man landed the job with a larger majority than he had garnered last time round. Comment. Micallef's success in the wake of openly expressed opposition to him by Leo Brincat, Evarist Bartolo and Michael Falzon is itself a comment on the state of the party. Second, taking into consideration the alarming fact that he was the general secretary of a party that lost the last general election on his watch, the man's victory in the early hours of Tuesday morning was nothing less than a declaration of war on the future by men whose minds are returning to the past.

Nobody in living memory has endured the concentrated insults heaped upon Micallef in the run-up to an election and survived. A less sensitive person would have turned tail and run as each printed slur and indignity was heaped upon him, in particular Michael Falzon's driven assault before Monday (B.M.) and A.M. For all that, he romped home with a 17 per cent lead over his nearest rival, Alfred Grixti. But even cocky Micallef needs to understand that 467 delegates out of 837 wanted him out. Had the opposition to him coalesced around one person, that is where he would have been.

Add to the Micallef saga the brazen return from the cold of Alex Sceberras Trigona, who has not renounced his membership of CNI as far as I know; whisk into the mixture the credentials of the deputy leaders chosen by the party delegates to lead the party to defeat at the next election; add an ode to 92-year-old Dom Mintoff covering his halcyon years (for Labour, that is) - but not his treacherous one (the choice of words is Alfred Sant's not mine); garnish the lot with the juices of a leader displaying chameleon tendencies in what he reckons are chameleonic times, and the party has started to look, impossible as this may sound, worse than it was before the elections earlier this year - when it was looking pretty grotty.

So, what's so difficult about coming up with an answer to explain the party delegates' bizarre decision? Well, for one thing, because for all the reasons one can drum up, the solution they arrived at has already tempted people to forecast that Labour has lost the next election. Pleasurable as this may seem, the government should not be waylaid by this temptation.

The internal earthquake Muscat promised has indeed taken place, but it is not the one he had in mind; or if it were, then we had better take a closer look at this young man to see, once we have no idea of where he is going, where he is coming from.

All signals are that he is trying to be all things to all men, to Sammy Meilak (and his ilk) George Abela (and his), to Mintoff (and whoever still holds a picture of him in his sitting room) and Sant who may well be metamorphosing into Muscat's eminence grise. After all, he and Micallef put him there; he and Micallef will presumably continue to lead him. How Abela and Farrugia feature in this quasi dance macabre, how they fit into the overall scheme of things, these are another matter.

People will be curious to see how Muscat can square the reports commissioned by the party in the wake of last March's electoral fiasco with Micallef's contribution to that catastrophe; inquisitive as to how Micallef himself will take reports on board that point accusatory fingers in his direction; apprehensive as to how the party will develop in opposition as it offers solid proof that it is in opposition with itself; quizzical as to Muscat's initiative on divorce without first consulting the parliamentary group on the matter and - er, like that.

None of this is good for Malta; there is little to prevent a party in this frame of mind from being hijacked by the Old Guard, from adopting harmful tactics in a bid to alienate the electorate from the structural weaknesses that now beset it.

As Labour settles into its internal contrariness, its opponents in government should not allow their delight to cloud their political and social judgment.

It is clear that for Muscat's leadership to work he will need to resort to politically Houdinesque techniques, but these take time to perfect. The party is tied up in knots; the last thing it wants is its leader similarly knotted.

The common good

In their statement on marriage and the family, the bishops of Malta and Gozo correctly pointed out that anything that weakened and broke up marriages and, inevitably, the family, had serious and lasting consequences for the common good of our society.

By bringing the concept of the common good into the discussion on marriage, the bishops have introduced a significant, philosophic element into the debate, one that does not feature in many of the contributions on the subject so far. Their call for the Christian community to participate intelligently in the discussion needs to be heeded, not least by those Christians in the media who have a positive contribution to make.