Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho said on Saturday that Portugal can not afford to keep the works of Miró, adding that when the government is having difficulty in providing money for repairing our national assets, it is not going to spend €35 or €37 or €40 million to keep some paintings by Miró, when "we don’t have the conditions to display and enjoy them."
Diverting the government’s desire to offload the works of art into the political areana, the Luddite PM said that “if we look to the future with this mentality, then we have to concede that the country has learned nothing from what has happened. But of course I believe that the country has learned a lot from what has gone on and we have to point out 'certain personalities' who think they own the country,” in an outspoken attack on Portugal's artistic community who wish to keep the works in Portugal.
The Prime Minister justified the sale of this impressive Miró collection, saying that no country can 'do it all' and he said there is a need to change mindsets in how you look at the economy. Passos Coelho concluded that there is not enough money for everything.
Passos Coelho was speaking at a weekend conference "Strategy and Management of EU Funds - Portugal 2020" and said that the discussion of the works of Miró was something that is "reminiscent of the worst aspects of our performance over the last 20 years.”
According to the PM, "there is nobody in the country who wouldn’t love to have the opportunity of having a good museum of modern art in which these works might appear, but no one is in any doubt as to the cost associated with this option."
Passos Coelho noted that even “the richest countries in the world can not do everything as most countries are in debt" - as is Portugal - arguing that one must be “extremely careful in the choices made because there is not enough money around to do everything."
Former Minister of Finance Teixeira dos Santos accused the government of having handled the collection Miró works with a degree of neglect.
"There is a strange urgency with which the whole process was handled, it was neglectful. This was reflected by the Tribunal ruling that the sale was illegal, which also surprised me. The process was handled in a somewhat clumsy way," said the politician who noted that the paintings did not become the property of the BPN bank until 2012 yet negotiations for their sale began as early as 2008, a month after the Banco Portuguese Negocios was privatised.
The PM appears not to have thought of the possibility of the works passing into private hands in Portugal with a proviso that they would then be on display for the public benefit.
The wealth of many of the top families and business people in Portugal would not be dented by a purchase of this size. The Gulbenkian Foundation has sufficient display space in Lisbon to mount a permanent exhibition where ticket sales would cover the purchase cost over time.
The PM’s insistence that the country can not afford these works is disingenuous when the cost is compared to many areas where he has failed to reduce needless state expenditure.
The cost to the nation of buying these paintings for the public’s enjoyment is less that one year of the subsidy sent to Spanish infrastructure company Ferrovial in compensation for the lack of traffic on the Algarve’s Via do Infante motorway, a sum currently running in excess of €40 million a year.
