It should have been the highest and most significant event in the four years Lawrence Gonzi has been leading the present administration.

It was, but not in the way he planned it.

Instead, it turned out to be a media disaster, not just in Malta but all over the world. It has now been immortalized, far more than in a statue of bronze, on Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQaC6hoYi-U) where future generations can look at Dr Gonzi’s bemused face as the machine turns him down, more than once.

A mistake can happen, and Murphy’s Law being Murphy’s Law, it will. The bank has now issued an apology for embarrassing the PM, but where were those who are specifically employed to avoid such mishaps happening to the prime minister? What if, at the 1964 Independence celebrations, the rope broke while the Maltese flag was being hoisted? It says much of the professionalism then and the dilettantism now very much in vogue.

It is a shame that this government repeatedly does what is good badly, or baldly.

So the euro has now come in and, by and large, has been accepted and is being handled by the Maltese, not without some chaotic moments, as predicted by this paper on 16 December. At the end, the situation was solved for the government by the much-maligned (by Labour) shopkeepers and by the much-maligned (by all) bus drivers who took the bull by the horns and eased themselves and the whole population out of a sticky situation.

Now that we have the euro, we can now look back and review the preparation that went before euro accession and see better where the failings lay. Only by understanding what went wrong, and by refusing to give in to the much-hyped self-congratulation that just because we are doing better than Cyprus and Slovenia a year back we must be better than them. Or that our preparation must have been better. Nothing of the sort as the long-term unfolding of events will show us.

On the macro level, as this paper highlighted last week, the population still has no idea why we had to change to the euro system. For all the undoubtedly lucrative advertising that went on, most of the population, if asked, will tell you we were forced by the EU to adopt the euro, or that like this we are now ‘like Italy, France and Germany’. Many believe the main merit is skipping the queues at the bank to exchange money before we go abroad.

Many have still not understood that, whatever merits the Maltese lira may have had, a world currency such as the euro is, a currency whish stands on its own two feet, is far bigger, stronger, better able to withstand external pressures, as evidenced by the improvement in Malta’s credit rating as a result of euro accession.

Nor have many understood, or had it explained to them, the advantages of one big market with no barriers, with one currency both for comparison purposes and also for freedom of movement, and the story in our paper today that the Customs is still operating in Mintoff mode underlines that whole areas of Malta are still locked in a protectionist timewarp.

None of this was made clear to the public in the concentrated campaign pre-euro accession.

Equally, on the micro level, the people handling euro accession (and not just NECC) were warned there would be problems with the buses, with people’s lack of cash in the first days, with the queues massing at the banks, up to and including yesterday – and did nothing about it. It was not just this paper that warned about coming problems, but also a delegation of constituted bodies which visited Slovenia.

To all warnings about impending problems, the consistent reply was to blame the bus drivers and the rest, but not one whit of self-censure. To which one must now add the government’s impotent rage at the many cases of rounding up of prices with the accompanying threat to impose the administrative sanctions to the full. Yesterday’s papers were full of instances where prices have been pushed up. We wait and see what will the government do, apart from barking its head off.

Nor are we impressed by the government’s latest ruse: to convert the NECC into some sort of anti-inflation authority.

The problem with NECC is that it did not do its job with the professionalism that was required, for all the hype and the money it spread around. Turned into a government department – oops, sorry, an authority – it will do even less. That comes from choosing close associates (and without any call for applications) rather than professionals, especially (and this has now become a bane with this government) people who seem to skip from one lucrative job to the next and who always seem to know where the goodies are to be found and who skip out (and out of the country) before things get tough. And people of the same kind who seem to congregate in specific places but not in others.

Yes, the euro is here and yes, people have adapted. But it was the bus drivers who saved the government’s bacon, and like them the patient shop-owners and the bank clerks. Much of the chaos of the past days (even though changing a currency is always chaotic and messy and people do tend to act very selfishly) could have been, if not entirely avoided, certainly faced better.