Blink And You’ve Missed It: PA’s Irrestawra Darek Scheme Glitches Out And Closes Within Minutes
The Irrestawra Darek grant scheme opened today – before closing again almost immediately, buckling under the pressure of an “overwhelming” influx of applications.
Originally meant to help homeowners, it has instead led to lost investments – and locals are speaking out.
“Our architect tried to apply, but was unsuccessful for two hours straight, as the system kept glitching” said a prospective applicant to Lovin Malta.
“That happened until they were thrown out of the system completely.”
The Planning Authority allocated €5 million to a scheme intended to restore Urban Conservation Area residences and other protected homes – reimbursing owners of UCA properties up to €11,000 for the cost of facade restoration, or up to €16,000 for scheduled Grade one and two properties.
A statement issued by the PA, after launching this scheme earlier today, explained that “the Irrestawra Darek scheme received an overwhelming response from applicants within minutes of its launch”.
The PA did not comment on allegations that the website was crashing almost immediately after applications opened.
The “overwhelming” response caused the category for private owners of UCA-based residences to close “due to high demand and over-subscription”.
“This category was allotted €4 million of the scheme’s €5 million budget” said the PA.
“The evaluation process will be commencing shortly.”
The rest of the scheme – for Grade one and two residential properties – has a purse of €1 million.
“This category will open on Tuesday, June 6th, 2023″ said the PA.
We’ll be keeping our eyes open to see how many seconds this one takes to close. I’m guessing it’ll be faster than Usain Bolt’s quickest 100metre dash.
“After the amount of advertising they did, social ads, radio, you’d think they would have been prepared for the traffic to their servers” said the person, who’s application didn’t go through.
For reference, here’s a video published by the PA just over a week ago.
Although it was clearly difficult, and there was a lot of luck involved in navigating a crashing PA website, some architects were able to cut through the noise and get their clients’ applications through.
All they needed was to simple ability to see through the matrix. Shouldn’t be a problem, that’s Architecture-101.
For those prospective applicants who failed to hire an architect played by Keanu Reeves, an attempt at attaining reimbursement may actually have cost money – and it doesn’t currently seem likely that they’ll be seeing any of it back.
“We paid our architect €600 for this service, for them to not even be able to upload any applications. All this after only giving people one week to get all the required documentation and quotations together to apply…” they continued.
“A lot of people’s time and money for nothing.”
Do you know any of the few fortunate souls who successfully filed an application?
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