Who gets to have a monument at Castille Square?

Prime Minister Robert Abela announced last week that former Prime Minister Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici is set to get a monument at Castille Square.

The decision courted controversy, with some questioning whether the former Labour leader deserved the monument. Momentum leader Arnold Cassola called it a “self-serving move” by Abela, while Mifsud Bonnici’s niece said he wouldn’t have wanted a €150,000 statue for himself.

Castille Square has now been used to honour former Maltese political leaders for a while. It was Dom Mintoff who first erected a statue of Labour’s first prime minister Paul Boffa and leftist activist Manuel Dimech. His successors followed suit with monuments for George Borg Olivier and Mintoff himself.

But who decides which monuments are erected? And do all prime ministers deserve a monument when they pass on?

A Heritage Malta spokesperson confirmed to this newspaper that decisions are generally taken by the government of the day.

Under the present administration monuments of former heads of states or prime ministers from both sides of the political divide have been erected.

The heritage management agency is then roped in at consultation and management stage. It is also tasked with launching public calls for proposals to appointing expert evaluators.

In cases where the public call does not yield the desired result, direct commissioning of artists may follow, a spokesperson for Heritage Malta told MaltaToday.

A spokesperson for the Culture Ministry confirmed the erection of monuments is a coordinated effort between government and the ministry.

“Presidents and prime ministers hailing from both sides of the political divide have had a monument erected in their honour since 2013,” the spokesperson said. “The procurement process from start to finish is driven forward by Heritage Malta.”

Monuments will always be controversial

Mario Thomas Vassallo, who heads the Department of Policy, Politics and Governance at the University of Malta, told MaltaToday that new monument will always stir controversy.

“From a local council to the United Nations, monuments will always be controversial,” he said.

Vassallo said Castille Square, overlooked by the seat of power, fits the bill for such monuments. He also insisted it is fitting that every prime minister gets a monument.

“We have monuments and statues of grand masters, why shouldn’t the Maltese people not honour their former leaders?” he said.

But for Vassallo, the monuments also serve to heal scars in the country’s collective conscience.

He used the example of Grand Master Jean Parisot de Valette who he said used despotic tactics in his running of Malta.

“He [La Vallette] had hanged a man by the name of Ġużeppi Mattew Callus because he had complained to the Spanish monarchy over how the Maltese were being treated by the Knights of St John,” he said. “We now obviously revere him as Maltese, but that is what he did to one of our compatriots. Myth building is important for a nation to thrive.”

He said the same goes for grandmasters Pinto and de Vilhena.

“Malta suffers from the disease that is loyalty to the party rather than the nation. These monuments, along with the passage of time, serve to unite social consciousness,” he concluded.

Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici was prime minister from 1984 to 1987. He died in November 2022, aged 89.

Mifsud Bonnici presided over one of Malta’s most turbulent periods in history, taking over the reins of a divided country from Dom Mintoff, and seeing through controversial reforms in education that resulted in the infamous church school protests and boycotts.

It was on his watch that Nationalist Party supporters were attacked and prevented from holding a mass meeting in Żejtun in 1986, and PN activist Raymond Caruana was murdered at the PN club in Gudja later that year.

Mifsud Bonnici was unable to quell the violence that characterised the period.

Never married, he practised law into his old age until his health permitted.