When, just over a year ago, the Church authorities announced plans to expand the Archbishop’s Seminary and a number of schools run by religious orders, it gave two reasons to justify its decision.
Firstly, it said primary schools have to be built to conform with the education reform, so that instead of going through stressful examinations pupils can continue seamlessly from primary to secondary levels.
The second reason is to try to satisfy more of the high demand for places in Church schools – there are about three applications for every one place available. Both reasons seemed perfectly reasonable at the time and raised few eyebrows.
Yet the report by Malta Environment and Planning Authority auditor Joseph Falzon regarding the way Mepa assessed (or rather did not properly assess) the application to expand the Archbishop’s Seminary contained two significant observations that seem to have escaped the attention of most media and commentators on the subject.
The first was the following: “With the drop in the birth rate of nearly 50 per cent in the last 15 years the construction of new schools except as replacement for existing buildings considered inadequate can hardly be justified anywhere.”
The government has for several years now been upgrading its schools and building at least one new one every year.
This upgrading/expansion, combined with the falling birth rate, and the Church’s decision to expand its schools, means that demand for privately-owned, fee-paying primary and secondary schools is inevitably going to fall.
So the owners of these private schools would probably have been willing to merge with, (or sell out at a discount to) Church schools.
There are two other ways Church secondary schools could have complied with the education reform without building new primary schools.
They could have merged with already existing primary schools owned by other religious orders, or simply used a ballot system instead of exams.
The local plan (policy NWRB7) governing further development within the Seminary grounds is clear – “there is a presumption against further development” unless the applicant demonstrates that “there is a genuine need for the use”.
The auditor’s second observation was that “the (Mepa) case officer had to assess whether the proposed use (increasing the size of the secondary school and building a completely new primary school) could be accepted as a genuine need.
He continued: “The applicant tried to justify his request by submitting a copy of an agreement between the school and the Education authorities... (but) the agreement does not in any way indicate that the proposed primary school has to be located in the Seminary grounds. It could easily have been located elsewhere, maybe in an existing redundant primary school.”
Due to the falling birth rate and the expansion of the state/Church schools there are probably going to be several redundant primary schools all over the island.
Another little-mentioned aspect of the Seminary expansion is the enlargement of the vocational centre (or retreat house). Here again, one has to ask whether existing buildings within the Seminary site, the windows of which appear to be closed for most of the year, could be better utilised to serve as an extension of this centre.
Also, Rabat is blessed with various monastic buildings of several religious orders, but with the fall in religious vocations over the past decades these are mostly under-utilised, besides being expensive to maintain. Could they not be put to better use as retreat houses?
It is against this background that the residents of Tal-Virtù and Rabat argue that there is little “genuine need” for the expansion within the Seminary grounds, and have petitioned the Archbishop to enter into discussions to find alternative solutions, and are presenting a legal challenge to Mepa on the basis for the development permit it issued.
This case presents the Archbishop with a good opportunity to bear true witness to the Church’s teachings in favour of sustainable development.
And on a recent TV discussion programme the Mepa chairman called for “common sense” to prevail. I couldn’t agree with him more.