Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies, an Irish playwright once wrote. As details of the Café Premier bailout emerged in the National Audit Office report, the government’s rationale grew increasingly hard to defend.
The businessmen involved have their own interests and shareholders to think of, but the government is answerable to the public.
Two main justifications for the €4.2 million deal were to remove dangers from catering outlets to the archives upstairs and to install a lift to make the Bibliotheca more accessible.
When NAO officials requested the related government policies, the Principal Permanent Secretary referred them to the Labour Party’s electoral manifesto. Here they found a broad statement on ‘consolidating’ the Bibliotheca and the national archives. They were not impressed.
The NAO also expected to see a cost-benefit analysis on the lift and a technical analysis examining possible access points. Nothing materialised. They concluded that this was a significant shortcoming.
On potential dangers to the library, it was said that gas cylinders in the Premier kitchen could blow up the building.
We all agree with removing any threats to the archives, but the lease agreement did not allow the use of gas and the Premier had already closed down anyway.
We were told that this unusual deal was driven by urgency. The government was in such a hurry to use the place that proper procedures and court litigation were thrown out of the window. Yet the deal was concluded over a year ago, in January 2014, and nothing more seems to have been done since then.
If the government intends to focus on the archives, which I fully support, then substantial funds are certainly needed for the conservation and storage of the papers themselves. Allocating more resources to speed up their digitisation is crucial, as this will safeguard their content and make it more accessible for research. Investment in IT and reader facilities is required. Good physical access is of course also vital.
Just down the road in St Christopher Street, the Notarial Archives are so short of funds that dedicated volunteers are urging people to ‘adopt a notary’ to help out.
These archives hold documents going back to the 1500s, with 17,000 volumes, many of which are damaged.
The building in which they are housed needs repairs. €4.2 million could have gone a long way towards conserving this fascinating legacy of historical records, which are still largely unexplored.
People overlook a lot of mistakes and mishaps, but they don’t like to be fooled
At one point, the Prime Minister then told the press that he disagrees with fast food restaurants in an ‘iconic’ building like the Bibliotheca. What are we to understand by this? Heritage buildings, museums and libraries everywhere have cafeterias, often serving coffee and cakes but also fast food. Or did he mean junk food? What about snack bars or wine bars, are they okay?
While disapproving of fast food in iconic buildings, at the same time the government thinks it is fine to move the monti to Valletta’s new entrance. The new Parliament, with its spectacular setting, already has the aura of an iconic building even though it is not quite finished.
This is why decisions about how to use urban spaces and buildings, especially in historic areas, should ideally be left to planners, architects and heritage experts, and not to politicians, who make things up as they go along.
The decision to spend €4.2 million of public funds and to bypass procedures in order to complete the deal in record time cannot be justified by citing imaginary gas cylinders, or a sudden mad rush to improve physical access to the Bibliotheca, or a ban on restaurants.
At a lecture on politics and morality organised by the Strickland Foundation last week, Prof. Susan Mendus made a valid point. People are sometimes less bothered by the dubious actions of politicians, she said, than by the way they try to cover them up. For instance, people were less upset by former US president Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky than by the fact that he lied about it.
We have our own examples. When former minister Emmanuel Mallia was obliged to resign over a shooting incident involving his driver, it was mainly due to allegations of a cover-up afterwards more than the incident itself. Former ministers Michael Falzon and Ninu Zammit are in the doghouse because they hid the truth about their earnings from their colleagues and from Parliament. This was recognised by Falzon in his apology.
People overlook a lot of mistakes and mishaps, but they don’t like to be fooled. Spending €4.2 million on the Premier was not based on a sound assessment of the needs of the Bibliotheca or the national archives, and it is false to pretend otherwise. This private handshake did not secure the best deal for the public.
As the dust settles, the gain for the Bibliotheca from this €4.2 million deal is the possibility of installing a lift, and at an additional cost. Is this value for money?
Where and how this lift should be constructed with the least damage to this historic building remains to be seen.
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