St John's project is not a moral or ethical issue

Astrid Vella (The Sunday Times, February 15) wrote that it is "extremely worrying when 'Roamer' and others put their political affiliations before the common good on matters as crucial as St John's Co-Cathedral".

Truly, I cannot understand why Ms Vella believes that all of those who are on her side are independent thinkers but none of those who oppose her methods - as distinct from backing the project - are.

Making up one's mind on the basis of gossip and bits of information gleaned from here and there is what people with a very low level of education do around the vegetable truck. There were many for whom the mission of aborting the project served as a vehicle for expressing resentment against the government or certain individuals whose name was associated with the project.

My view is that anyone and everyone who proposes a project has the right to have that project assessed by the competent authorities, without having that right sabotaged by others. The FAA argues that there was no need to go through the motions because the project was obviously a bad one. I disagree because it is like insisting that if a man is 'obviously' guilty of murder, then we should waste no time or money on a trial by jury and lynch him instead.

Ms Vella wrote that "the public has been proved right" because the project was withdrawn. This is a typical example of the illogical thinking which has riddled the FAA's many public pronouncements. Ms Vella has no way of knowing what "the public" thinks because she has not surveyed public opinion. The withdrawal of the project and the rightness or wrongness of public opinion are two separate matters entirely and are not linked.

The withdrawal of the project does not make its critics "right", just as the non-withdrawal of the project would not have made its proponents "right", either. The construction of a museum is not a moral or ethical issue, and so it is not a matter of right or wrong but of feasible or unfeasible based on the facts drawn up through exhaustive technical research.