I have not­ed a let­ter from Prof Ken­ny in your pa­per where he claimed that it is an "un­de­ni­able fact" that the ap­pli­ca­tion for a CEC for the Per­form­ing Arts Acad­e­my did not con­tain any ref­er­ence to a ho­tel. How­ev­er, for con­sis­ten­cy, he should ap­ply the same zeal to ex­am­in­ing the en­vi­ron­men­tal record and ad­her­ence to the build­ing laws in some of the oth­er ar­eas of na­tion­al de­vel­op­ment.

If he did so, he might dis­cov­er some ev­i­dence of hypocrisy or dou­ble stan­dards on the part of oth­ers, and he might even dis­cov­er bla­tant dis­re­gard for our plan­ning laws by some of the peo­ple who are most vo­cal about this is­sue. I have al­so ob­served that Ken­ny took is­sue with my use of the phrase "the true facts." How­ev­er, if he did some re­search on the et­y­mol­o­gy of this phrase (as op­posed to en­to­mol­o­gy, which he is cer­tain­ly fa­mil­iar with), he would dis­cov­er that, his­tor­i­cal­ly, the word "fact" has of­ten been used to in­di­cate an al­le­ga­tion of some­thing that may or may not be a "true fact."

He would al­so dis­cov­er that this ter­mi­nol­o­gy, ie "the true facts," al­though con­test­ed by some crit­ics, has a long his­to­ry in stan­dard Eng­lish. Ac­cord­ing­ly, it is an un­de­ni­able and "true fact" that when the acad­e­my was con­cep­tu­alised and agreed to by the Gov­ern­ment in 2006, the scope of works for the project in­clud­ed ho­tel ac­com­mo­da­tion. This fact was re­peat­ed in PSIP doc­u­ments and in the Vi­sion 2020 Im­ple­men­ta­tion�Plan, among oth­er pub­lic doc­u­ments. Long be­fore the idea of a ho­tel be­came an is­sue in 2008, there­fore, it was an es­tab­lished and true fact, that was known to all mem­bers of the Cab­i­net, that a ho­tel was in­clud­ed in the acad­e­my, and that it was in­tend­ed to serve the needs of vis­it­ing lec­tur­ers and artistes. Fur­ther, the in­clu­sion of ho­tel ac­com­mo­da­tion in an acad­e­my of this na­ture is stan­dard prac­tice in oth­er coun­tries.�

Fi­nal­ly, all of this fuss about a 50 or 60-room ho­tel in�the acad­e­my is in my view an ex­treme­ly triv­ial storm in a teacup, be­cause when all of the rel­e­vant land use fac­tors are con­sid­ered in the con­text of the Princes Build­ing site, to­geth­er with the his­tor­i­cal land util­i­sa­tion pat­terns around the Queen's Park Sa­van­nah and in the St Clair Es­tate, in­clud­ing the true fact that the Queen's Park Ho­tel was for many years lo­cat­ed just a few me­tres away from the site, on­ly a very un­rea­son­able per­son would ob­ject to medi­um-scale ho­tel ac­com­mo­da­tion at that lo­ca­tion.�

Colm Im­bert

Min­is­ter of Works and Trans­port