It is already a miracle that the application for the extension of the St John’s Co-Cathedral museum has been approved.

The first application, as many will remember, was to dig out a huge hole underneath St John’s Square and use two huge cisterns there to extend the museum and consequently the time visitors spend in there.

When that ran into political fireworks, the archbishop ordered the idea to be shelved.

The second one was a much re-dimensioned version. It ran into trouble with UNESCO but around a later, it was represented with minor changes and was approved. That was the first miracle by St John.

But now it would seem we are awaiting for a second miracle by the saint.

Which is how to build a massive hall with minimum disturbance and to finish it in time for the Valletta Capital City of Culture in 2018, which is just 16 months away.

You wouldn’t build a washroom in that time, let alone such a hall.

The last we heard, the foundation was still trying to reach an agreement with the owners of the shops that will be displaced by the project.

No preparatory work has been undertaken in the courtyard where sensitive work is awaited to turn the courtyard and the memorial to the knights who died in the Great Siege (the story the dead knights are buried there is completely untrue).

The great hall which is meant to be both tall and long to accommodate all the priceless tapestries will stretch all the way from St Lucia Street to the present exit from the museum.

Its design, as approved by Mepa, fortunately is not a simple box-like one, but has a pleasant design to break up the long line of the masonry.

We have now been half-promised that the crane for the construction will not be neither in Merchants Street nor in St Lucy Street but if possible inside the courtyard itself.

When all Malta is up in arms about the four tower blocks at Mriehel and the skyscraper on top of the Union Club in Sliema, the St John’s museum extension will bring havoc and confusion to Merchants Street, so recently freed from the Monti stalls.

Coming to think of that, one does not recollect any representative of the Valletta Council at the Mepa hearing that approved the application but only a few representatives of the eNGOs who seemed to have somehow come to a conclusion there was nothing much they could say or do.

We urge careful planning and construction. Next year, as Malta will be the President of the EU there will undoubtedly be many State visits or summits in Malta and they will undoubtedly be taken to view St John’s. It would be a pity if even that will turn out to be a building site.

The following year will see Valletta as the Capital City of Culture. It would be a pity to have Valletta resemble a building site. When Malta last was a Capital City of Culture, in 1997, Republic Street was a huge building site as the planning works had ran beyond the timescale allowed them. It would be a pity if we were to repeat this as if we have learnt nothing.

There is no time for the St John’s Museum to be up and ready in time for these two important years. It would be better if they are ready when they are properly ready.