Among the videos for "kids" that I used to repeatedly view not so long ago, Stephen Spielberg's An American Tail remains a highlight. Its spiel is about a family of Ukrainian mice which emigrates - irregularly? illegally? - to the US. It is done through the perspective of the young son of the family, Fievel, who shares the enthusiasm of his entourage for the heaven on earth that life in America will be.
We follow Fievel onto the ship which carries the mice to their land of hope and glory. Midway across the Atlantic, the assembled emigrants sing about their future aspirations: "For there are no cats in America and the streets are paved with cheese". Naturally, there was some disillusionment when their ship reached New York.
Perhaps the major problem that the Gonzi administration must deal with is that it purposely raised expectations too high. It hardly makes a difference to say that promises were made under the premiership of Eddie Fenech Adami. At the time, Lawrence Gonzi served as deputy PM and carries equal responsibility as his then chief for promises made. With the PN at the helm of government and with Malta in the EU (equivalent if you like to Fievel's America), people expected a future of cheesy bliss, with no cats around, or at least, fewer fat cats.
Two years down the line, reports reach me about how unprepared we are to reap the benefits of EU membership, such as they are. Despite the PR glitz launched by government ministries, the processes, for instance, by which Maltese enterprises can apply for EU project funds remain primitive, understaffed and under-financed. Feedback and support for people who wish to launch projects and get EU funding for them remain practically non-existent, both at the Malta end and from the Mission in Brussels.
The promised cheese will be long in coming if things continue like they are. New or small companies face formidable obstacles if they try to penetrate the Brussels bureaucracy, not least because there is little to no seed money available from Malta to help them negotiate the initial hurdles. A number of companies are trying to get information not from the Malta Mission but from other Missions and entities in Brussels because, through experience, they believe that is the only way by which they can make some progress.
I hope for the country's sake that this version of events is exaggerated. But I have gotten such reports on a number of occasions from different sources and they build into a consistent pattern. The people who give these accounts are not elderly fuddy duddies, but middle class, well educated, enterprising businessmen many of them in their 30s, who believe in the EU. They are trying to consolidate or expand their operations, they are outgoing and willing to learn and work hard, they believe they have what it takes to get things done with success. Increasingly they feel frustrated by what they consider to be the wall of incompetence and misinformation that surrounds them.
Similarly on the question of how government contracts and permits are dished out. Admittedly those who speak to the Labour opposition to complain have lost out on what they wanted to obtain and feel aggrieved. But again, the information coming in about how enterprises get frozen out of contracts - or about how they get sidelined - because they belong, or are perceived as belonging, to this or that political clique, even within the PN power structure builds into a consistent pattern. How the same people or firms almost always end up getting the contracts from this or that ministry is another trend that has become firmly established.
As Fievel and his friends found when they reached America, the streets are not paved with cheese and much of the available provolone still is allocated to a number of select big cats. No wonder that with zero shame on the government side, work started on the petrol station that raised so much controversy at Mellieha just one day after the local council elections were over...
The EU's system to dispose of excess food stocks is well established and rational - within the overall policy of protection for the Union's continental farmers that has kept internal food prices on the high to very high side. A percentage of the food stocks which are in surplus is distributed to orphanages and charitable institutions. The understanding is that such supplies will be consumed by inmates and not marketed. All member states get their share of this apportionment.
Only in Malta would a minister and his parliamentary secretary consider it necessary to make a big show of the transfer of EU rice and other food stocks to charitable institutions. For people aged 60 and over, it seemed like a throwback to the 1950s. In those days, Malta used to receive food consignments of cheese and butter from the American Care organisation, for free distribution to families. Did the transfer of excess EU food stocks to orphanages need to be turned into a ludicrous political show, making the island look like a destitute Third World society?
The reality is turning out to be very different from the cat-free vision of streets paved with cheese that the PN projected only two years ago.
Happy Easter to the editor, staff and readers of The Times.