Miracle on Republic Street

Never mind what all the sceptics say: Christmas is undeniably a time for miracles, great and small.

The Christmas stories of my childhood conjured up images of tightfisted misers who suddenly become warm-hearted and generous; or of overweight, unmarried old hermits who somehow manage to visit all the world's children in a single night... without actually molesting any of them.

It's Christmas, you see. The season to perform unlikely feats of self-transmogrification. The season to forget your grievances, to forget your troubles, and - in some cases - to forget all about everything you've ever believed, said or been (but just for Christmas, mind. It all goes back to faeces right after the Epiphany.)

Speaking of epiphanies: did you see the Republic Street decorations this year? That's right, the ones who went protesting about this thing called 'the environment' last Saturday? OK, by 'decorations' I don't mean necessarily all of them. Let's be honest and admit that genuine Christmas tree-huggers do exist. And some them have pretty big baubles, too. Yule be surprised.

But among the trinkets and tinsel that turned up for last Saturday's protest were some rather unexpected little Christmas robins, or so I am told. (Note: I had to be told this, as I did not attend the protest for reasons that should become obvious later in this article).

These included several members of the Nationalist Party executive, who oddly enough were conspicuously absent from almost identical protests held five and nine years ago respectively - the former against the development of an ODZ villa in Bahrija (owned by the PN's former president, Victor Scerri); the latter against a government initiative to radically extend the footprint of developable land in Malta (thus enabling precisely the sort of development that triggered last Saturday's protest).

I attended the 2005 ODZ extension protest, and certainly do not remember any formal representation there by the PN. I do however remember several Labour representatives... and I'll come back to this point in a sec.

In the case of the Bahrija march four years later, not only was PN presence understandably all-but non-existent - the protest was after all directed at the same party's president, for crying out loud - but the demonstrators themselves were jeered, booed and hissed at by all the usual government apologists of the day, who predictably interpreted this mainly middle class cry of environmentalist angst as an act of political treachery.

Well, just last month we were served with another reminder of that little Bahrija incident. The same villa that gave rise to all the above hullaballoo was finally sold for €860,000. And no sooner had the ink dried on the contract, than the same people who fought to make that particular disfigurement of Bahrija possible were all seen rushing off to Valletta to protest against the proposed disfigurement of yet another spot of countryside (this time under a different administration of government).

But I guess that's the magic of Christmas, right? One tot of brandy and a couple of mince pies later, and and not only does the Nationalist Party suddenly forget all about its own past experiences as a tireless champion of questionable development at the expense of the environment... but its members now march shoulder to shoulder with the Ramblers' Association and Flimkien ghal-Ambjent Ahjar: i.e, the same two groups which had jointly organised both the Bahrija protest in 2009, and the ODZ protest in 2005.

And yet nearly all the legal and administrative changes facilitating things like the Mistra project can be traced directly to decisions taken and defended by some of the people protesting last Saturday. It seems to have escaped even the NGOs' attention that the permit itself had been granted in 2009 - which is odd, because I don't remember anyone protesting at the time. Another detail that seems to have been overlooked concerns the fact that the same Mistra developers are legally represented by Anne Fenech: current president of the same PN which was also represented at Saturday's protest march.

In any case: if the Nationalist Opposition was in attendance last Saturday, the Labour government was conspicuously absent. And again, it must be the spirit of Christmas at work behind the scenes.

Newspaper reports from 2009 and 2005 paint a rather different picture of the Labour Party's environmentalist credentials. This one describes the aforementioned 'Stop the Ruin of Bahrija' protest of 2009: "The protest was attended also by Labour MEPs Edward Scicluna and Joseph Cuschieri, Nationalist MEP candidate Alan Deidun [note: the honourable exception that makes the rule], various Labour MPs including environment spokesman Leo Brincat, Rabat mayor Sandro Craus and Azzjoni Nazzjonali spokesman John Spiteri Gingell..."

Four Christmasses earlier, this what Labour spokesmen Leo Brincat and Roderick Galdes (now environment minister and junior minister respectively) had to say about the 2005 ODZ 'rationalisation' scheme: "It is very difficult not to believe that there are no ulterior motives with regard to the Nationalist government's policy on building and planning..."

But oh look: with the smell of Christmas pudding now arising from their own ovens, those same two Labour MPs - along with the rest of their party - miraculously discover that having 'ulterior motives with regard to building and planning policy' might not be such a bad thing after all. Perhaps the PN were right to always cave in to practically every developer's every demand. Perhaps that's why they managed to stay in government for almost a quarter of a century...

In a sense I can almost sympathise with their rationale. The alternative to that last hypothesis is that the PN ruled the roost for 25 years simply because the Labour Party was crap in opposition. And a crappy opposition is likely to be a crappy government. So it should come as no surprise that, at least on the development/environmentalist front, there just happens to be no difference at all between Labour and PN. Just a straight swapping of the same crappy roles, in every detail, every few years.

Meanwhile, Labour-leaning commentators all over the online and offline press suddenly experience collective amnesia: forgetting all about protests they themselves had attended just a few years earlier, and loudly demanding to know 'where all these demonstrators were hiding' throughout the 25 years of PN administration.

Well, it is an easy enough question to answer. They were walking down Republic Street under banners and placards that you yourselves were helping them to carry: both literally and figuratively.

There is, however, a limit to the infectiousness of this same miraculous Christmas spirit. No amount of good cheer is likely to convince me that Saturday's protest was in fact a genuine environmentalist rally at all... not when I can see from the footage than many in that crowd (not just politicians) had not so long ago argued in defence of almost identical development projects, when they were carried out by a different regime. 

And with hindsight, the same was clearly true of all the other protests, too. Insofar as issues are concerned, Bahrija and 'rationalisation' were largely incidental to the bigger picture. They were, in fact, mere excuses to indulge in our chosen national pastime: a periodic urge to complain about anything and everything the present government does... when we all know perfectly well that the people who complain the loudest will behave exactly the same way, in every detail, no sooner is the shoe on the other foot.

And they say the age of miracles is over...