Astrid Vella of Flimkien ghal Ambjent Ahjar has had nothing much to say, with or without a megaphone, for the last two years – though she broke her silence briefly to say how pleased she was when the incoming Labour government decorated her, with Malta’s highest honour for services to the Republic, in its very first Republic Day Honours List.
It could have been worse. They could have made her ambassador to Washington or Madrid, but a couple of Labour Party lackeys from her home turf – one of them a paid lackey – got there first while Mrs Vella has to make do with a medal and no salary or position attached.
She is no longer a cherished and much-invited talk-show guest on the Labour Party’s television station (she must wonder why). And while the government rampages over every aspect of the environment in a Panzer tank driven by Sandro Chetcuti, the Malta Developers Association, the hunters’ lobby and various businessmen with a Third-World, colonial-asset-stripping mindset, all we have had, from the woman who once spent her weekends marching with a megaphone and a bunch of embarrassing middle-aged people massacring Give Peace A Chance, is a couple of squeaks covered by the press in a brief paragraph buried deep in the inside pages. Gone are the days of rallies, protest marches, placards, and addressing angry switchers off the back of a lorry through a megaphone.
Mrs Vella led a march (with Jason Micallef of the Labour Party) on a small country house that the then National Party president was converting with full permits but hasn’t bothered leading any such march on Social Policy Minister Helena Dalli’s controversial house, though it has received a great deal of coverage in the press. And I don’t think she’s planning to organise Sliema switchers and Jason Micallef to march on John Dalli’s massive ‘two-room conversion’, with its nuclear-type bunker, on the Girgenti road, either.
It’s impossible to take people like this seriously at the level of professional credibility, for which consistency is a prerequisite. But you have to take them seriously for other reasons: all the pointless trouble they cause when they wake up to an agenda which they haven’t quite thought through. Right now, Mrs Vella’s agenda is getting the government to restore Villa Guardamangia irrespective of the wishes of its private owners, and then send them the bill. Those who reason this way generally do so because they are unable to grasp the basic principles of property rights and beyond this, have never owned a historic house or listed building.
Mrs Vella attributes ulterior motives to the owners: that they are deliberately allowing the house to fall into disrepair so that they can sell it to somebody who wants to build flats. The more obvious explanation appears not to have occurred to her, though it is the primary reason most large and beautiful old buildings with big gardens are sold for development or, if they cannot be because they are listed, left empty and not maintained. This is that such buildings are most often owned, in the present generation, by several siblings or cousins who inherited them directly from their parents or grandparents. Their parents and grandparents lived in them and ran them as households in an age when it was possible to pay a retinue of servants to look after the building and those who lived in it, and the garden. The reason houses like that are so big is because children were numerous and some of the servants lived there too.
None of that is possible or practical today. In the unlikely event that these houses are inherited by just the one person (they sometimes are), the owners have no incentive to restore and maintain them because they cannot afford to live in them and run them on a daily basis. Sometimes, they do not even have the wherewithal to restore and repair them. And if they are inherited by more than one person, as is most often the case, it is blindingly obvious that the building has to be sold, because several siblings and/or cousins cannot retain shared ownership of it while it lies empty.
But nobody wants to buy buildings like that for the same reason that the owners don’t want to live in them – they are no longer practical as homes in the 21st century. Over and above that, the real estate price is more than anybody is willing to pay for a home, and then there are the restoration and repair costs to add on. So the only market for houses like Villa Guardamangia is among developers.
The only other solution is for the government to buy such houses outright and restore and maintain them at state expense, for public use. If these buildings are considered public heritage, then it follows that public heritage must not be maintained at private expense, enforced by law, but at public expense, but with the consent of the owners and market-price compensation paid to them, and not through enforced expropriation or requisition. The government is, apparently, in negotiation with the owners to buy Villa Guardamangia, or so it has told the press.
Astrid Vella finds it very easy, when it suits her, to be bossy and dogmatic about other people’s real estate. This is because she cannot, or will not, consider the impossible position the owners of such buildings are in. People with little or no imagination find it difficult to understand situations which they have not faced themselves.
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