Undoubtedly, the completion, the inauguration and the full proper functioning of the Mater Dei Hospital constitute the most important of this government’s deliverables.

But a close examination of the history of the policy infrastructure, which ideally should lead to the deliverable, shows not just the immense problems underlying such a public commitment but also the present administration’s deep, structural flaws.

For the Mater Dei gestation has had six quite separate phases under one and the same Nationalist administration, and a separate history under the two-year Labour administration in which quite far-reaching decisions were taken. Mainly, however, the mess that is Mater Dei is mostly the PN’s doing.

The project was first announced by the pre-1996 Fenech Adami administration to the San Raffaele team from Milan whose plans for a small, training hospital were swept away by Alfred Sant’s administration.

Back to a PN administration and the construction and project management of the hospital was given jointly to the Health Division and the Foundation for Medical Services (FMS). The impression given at the time was that the Health Division was driving the project with the foundation acting as its contractor, but somehow, at a later stage, the roles seem to have been reversed and the FMS emerged as the front driver.

Following Dr Gonzi’s ascent to Castille, the Finance Ministry was called in and started calling the shots. Then Austin Gatt’s ministry was called in, ostensibly to supervise the IT plans and it seemed that its remit kept getting wider and wider.

Now, following the well-known events surrounding the IT contract, OPM is now in the driving seat.

So, barring any last minute twist, the hospital, when it finally gets to be born, will have had two governments as parents and six distinct phases in its gestation. Hopefully, the children to be born in it will have a less complicated gestation!

While all this may be hidden from the public gaze, and possibly the change in drivers may be found in any project, public or private, only government insiders can tell the animosity exhibited by each and every successive driver for the ones who went before and also the ones succeeding. To hear them talk, all was hopeless before them and impossible after them!

In a way, this analysis shows quite clearly that, instead of sacking ministers and making Cabinet reshuffles, Dr Gonzi tried to get the same results without the bloodletting that a reshuffle entails. We will only get to know whether such a tactic has worked and post 1 July when the new hospital starts functioning with or without hiccups.

But trying to anticipate these events, and rather from the outside, it seems that such a complicated gestation cannot have an easy and linear outcome. In other words, it just cannot work. And will most probably not work.

It cannot work because the basic attitude all along seems to have been solely who is in the driving seat. In other words, it was all translated into terms of power. And ultimately and logically, the jockeying for power necessarily had to end at the ultimate seat of power: Castille. But just as Castille, or OPM, cannot do everything as it needs the full and pro-active cooperation of all to govern the country, so too Castille as the driver who gets involved in all the nitty-gritty issues cannot, and will not, solve the complex issues involved in the running of the hospital.

Secondly, there seems to have been, all through, a tacit refusal to really involve the people who will ultimately run, or run down, the hospital – the doctors, the nurses, the various levels of employees. The country has heard, innumerable times, the doctors’ and the nurses’ associations complain that they have not been consulted at all in the delicate issue of the migration from St Luke’s to Mater Dei. How the top levels that have been bickering so much who is or should be in the driving seat intend to migrate without real and ongoing consultations defies understanding.

Thirdly, come 1 July, or thereabouts, the real actors in the hospital will be the population as a whole, as anyone who visits St Luke’s can see for himself. But, again, the way the hospital has, and is, being presented to the public is completely wrong. For the emphasis has been, and still is, on eking partisan kudos rather than on giving proper information to the public. It will not be with the holding of coffee mornings in the empty hospital that the public will be informed. Nor by the pressurising of select journalists or television coverage of the new pneumatic system of sending items from one department to the other that proper information is given.

Finally, real and proper information is still withheld from the public. Such as regards decisions still to be taken and which, for all the OPM involvement in the project, are still awaiting resolution. Such as: what will happen to the IT project which was boasted will be an all-time novelty for the whole world? To have delayed such a decision for the past three months, or else to have taken the decision but not informed the public – one really does not know which of the two is the worst – shows in all its starkness the limits of the policy infrastructure that passes for public policy at present in our country.