No New Year’s Eve at the Granaries

The Floriana Granaries have been ruled out as the venue for any prospective New Year’s Eve celebrations.

“The Granaries are too big a space to fill and you’d need at least 20,000 people to have an enjoyable atmosphere,” Floriana mayor Nigel Holland said, adding the event had such an unpredictable attendance it would be a risk holding it there.

He pointed out the site was very exposed to the elements. “When the Joseph Calleja concert was cancelled, at first we thought it was a joke but when I visited the site on the day the concert was meant to be held I found it was unbearable,” Mr Holland said referring to the cancellation of the tenor’s concert last summer because of high winds.

Mr Holland was speaking at a press conference during which he reacted to comments made by the Valletta local council on Thursday in a post mortem of its heavily-attended New Year’s Eve celebrations.

The Valletta council complained about the fact that St Anne Street in Floriana was closed on the day for the neighbouring town’s celebration, claiming this disrupted traffic. It also suggested the Granaries could be used as the site for future NYE celebrations.

However, Mr Holland looked at it in a different way, saying it was shameless of the Valletta council “to first steal the idea for an event (the Floriana council was the first to hold public a NYE celebration in 2009) and then try to change the original event to suit your needs”.

He said the traffic flowed well because people were entering the city, adding the trouble only started once the celebrations were over. He insisted the Valletta council should blame the transport service rather than the Floriana council.

Defending his locality’s right to hold such events, Mr Holland said: “Malta is the only country where the Independence declaration was not signed in the capital and where big events cannot be held in the capital because there is not enough space”.

He accused the Valletta council of not cooperating, saying it was threatening not to allow fireworks to be launched from near the Central Bank if Floriana did not fork out half the €1,500 levied by the public transport operators to run the night service.

The Floriana council, Mr Holland said, did not want to pay as it disagreed on a point of principle and the Valletta council should check how it got a lousy service if it was paying so much for it.

Asked to comment on this public bickering between the two councils, Mr Holland said both councils were making a laughing stock of themselves and risked raising football rivalry to local government level.