Many still do not appreciate how difficult it is to lure new direct investment towards this country – meaning fresh funds that arrive to establish a good business and employ people.

We lack an internal market that is big enough, we lack natural resources, while the markets we could target are not close by. True, the digital revolution has brought most locations in the world close to each other. However that applies to all and implies no particular advantage for us.  

When meeting the challenge of how to attract the required investment flows,inevitably we must overcome numerous uncertainties. Actually, during the last twenty years, though we joined the EU and swapped our national currency for the euro, the levels of private and public investment relative to GDP kept declining.

In the quest to promote new investment, it becomes increasingly tempting to chase bubbles in order to counter the problems one faces, and to start believing proposals that are so incredibly promising they amount to fairy tales. They provide the illusion that at last we might have found agood reply to an eternal question – how can we induce more investment to come our way?

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Apologies

I can remember how post-1987, when the Labour Party came to the end of quite a long stint in government, some people and certain sectors of our society would repeatedly make calls on the Party to apologise for this or that.

Today, more than two years after the Nationalist Partycame to the end of a far longer stint in government, I’m surprised at how the same people and the same sectors of society are failing to demand much deeper apologies from the PN.

For no matter how one looks at it, abuses committed under their watch were really over the top. There was for instance the fact that during their term of office, Nationalist ministers failed to declare to Parliament and to their Prime Minister that they held substantial funds abroad on which they never paid tax – and indeed lied brazenly over the matter.

Or the fact that the construction of Mater Dei hospital was abysmally managed and supervised, with huge detriment to the national interest.

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Literature and drama

Over the years I have puzzled over the link, if it exists, between literature and drama. Friends used to tell me that theatrical scripts and “literature” are incompatible. I could understand what they meant and that within certain parameters, they were quite correct. A theatrical show deploys language only as one of its tools, and this tool is not always so important. On the other hand, that a ”literary” theatre does exist is a reality.

Sometimes, texts that serve as the basis for dramatic presentations, including the cinema, are purposely drafted in an anti-literary mode both in style and idiom. Incoherent vulgarity has acquired the stamp of a “post modern” naturalism. It is no longer avant garde but has becomemainstream.

I’ve been told that a piece of cynical advice now being given to those who still wish to shock is the following: just produce a show which does not feaure a single vulgarity.