One may perhaps think this comment is rather premature, seeing that all one can see of the future Parliament building is just a big hole in Freedom Square.

But it is an idea conceived during Monday’s early and longer-than-usual Parliamentary sitting on the ‘black dust committee’, as without doubt it will now be called.

There are issues and sittings that are more dead than Valletta at midnight. But there are issues that are vital to people’s interests and concerns, such as this one regarding the persistent black dust phenomenon.

Then there are parliamentary sittings of the plenary (not that there would be many MPs attending these, on a normal basis) and there are the hearings of committees such as the Social Affairs Committee, this black dust committee, and why not, (if only for drama and things happening) the Public Accounts Committee.

Unfortunately, such committees rarely get the audience they deserve. It is possible to get to hear them in recordings on the Parliament website (www.gov.mt) but only after they take place.

So the suggestion we are making runs like this: in the new Parliament building there could be limited TV links, focused both on the plenary sittings and on the committee hearings.

Could it be conceivable to either allow people into the committee hearings without the sort of red tape that limits, severely, the number of people who attend?

Or would it be rather more advantageous to have one or more rooms for ordinary citizens coming into Valletta or exiting it, possibly at ground floor level, or even in or around the sunken garden, and allow people to watch what is going on in the committees, etc with the minimum of fuss or red tape?

There is no need for Parliament to have its own TV station: just a minimal web camera plus decent microphones all managed by a skeleton staff should do the trick.

There is no need either for the TV broadcast to go out on air, even though it can conceivably be web-based. But that would in a way defeat the whole purpose: it would be once again condemning Parliament to be a building inhabited only by those who have to be there but abandoned by all the rest. It would just substitute a forlorn dark series of corridors with shadows crossing each other, giving the perception of dark dealings, with another building, new, state-of-the-art, but just the same devoid of people.

The idea behind Parliament is to get the people closer to those who govern it. The bad examples of the past must not serve as an excuse to limit as much as possible public access to the House. This is, after all, the House of the People.

Can we thus dream of an evening some three or four years hence when City Gate will have been changed to nothing like we have today, when the area is a hive of people encountering each other and mixing together. Would it then be possible for people to enter the lower reaches of the Parliament and listen to what their representatives are saying?