Editorial

There is something quite wonderful about the blogging phenomenon. It has allowed people from all walks of life to interact instantaneously; to put forward comments, points of view, and to engage in animated debate or argument.

It has made the so-called ordinary citizen more important because his views have an outlet at any time of day. And it is no flash in the pan or fad. It is here to stay. People, politicians in particular, will ignore it at their peril.

But it has its downsides. Because bloggers are not face to face with their opponents and because they are not restrained by an editor's red pen or by the ethos and standards of a medium such as this one, they tend to be more forthright, more reckless, more insulting.

They also have a tendency to comment authoritatively on everything under the sun, even if the back of a postage stamp would actually provide more than ample space for the sum total of their knowledge on a given subject. The unfortunate result is that if someone has managed to down a glass of claret, he's a wine expert; if he's gone to school, an expert on education; and if he's managed to do both then he knows more about running the country than the Prime Minister.

Enter Renzo Piano, the architect commissioned by the real Prime Minister of this country to come up with plans to take what is either an ugly or neglected entrance to the wonderful city that is Valletta and turn it into something magnificent. And if the plans he presented yesterday materialise, that is precisely what he will do.

We should be overjoyed that Mr Piano was asked - and accepted - to take on this project. We should be overjoyed that the inappropriately named Freedom Square - which today is nothing more than an oil-stained tarmac eyesore - will be filled with an imaginative building that houses the place where our legislative heart beats and that the ruins of the once-wonderful opera house will be restored and given life for the first time since a war-time bomb cruelly took it away.

But some people are not. The more genuine objectors would have preferred the opera house to be transformed into a roofed national theatre. In the ideal world that would have been both physically and financially possible. Mr Piano, in whose judgment we must trust, has decided it is not. By all means let's have the national theatre debate. Just not here and not now. Because Valletta needs this transformation; and because we finally have a government that is willing and able to put its money where its mouth is.

The less sincere of the objectors, and the more ignorant ones, think they can come up with something better than one of the world's best creative architects. Or they will simply oppose anything because it gives them an opportunity to fill the comment sections of websites and newspapers. They have to be ignored, for if they are not there is a grave danger Malta will never move forward.

If object we must, then it must be to protest against the fact that Mr Piano's brief is to leave untouched the unsightly arcade and flats that will still protrude like a boil once his work is complete. That is what the bloggers should be talking about.