The latest twist in the long-running Berkeley saga ? as reported in the Mid-Ocean News on Friday ? should raise deep concerns and will add weight to calls for an inquiry into the whole sorry mess.

The stories contain allegations from a building inspector who claims that much of the work done on the "state of the art" building is shoddy. Some aspects, including the electrical wiring and the fire retardation of the building, is downright dangerous, according to Gabriel Martel, who says he was brought in to do the inspection work.

What's worse, he alleges that his report was shelved and he himself was dismissed by his employers after submitting it. Mr. Martel goes on to make further serious allegations against both his employer, Somers Construction, and the Ministry of Works and Engineering, which took over as general contractor when it dismissed the original builder, Pro-Active Management Systems Ltd.

Unfortunately, Works Minister Sen. David Burch chose not to respond to the allegations beyond saying no final report had been done and that he was satisfied with the weekly briefings he received on the project. Instead he spent most of the time engaged in shooting the messenger in a vituperative attack on the Mid-Ocean News.

Sen. Burch is entitled to his opinions about the newspaper, and has the perfect avenue to attack it every Sunday night on his radio show. But what should be of greater concern to the Government and to the community as a whole are the allegations made by Mr. Martel. For Sen. Burch to say he had not bothered to look into it because of the medium in which the allegations appeared is not good enough.

If Mr. Martel's allegations are true, then there is every reason to be concerned about putting children at risk and remediation work on the building needs to be done, regardless of the further cost to what is already the most disastrously expensive capital project ever undertaken in Bermuda under any Government.

If the allegations are not true, then the public needs to be informed immediately. Of course, Government itself is probably not qualified to give that opinion, because the history of dissembling and outright lying that has accompanied the Berkeley project means that it has no credibility.

For that reason, an independent inspector must be appointed to examine the building again and to determine whether Mr. Martel's allegations are true or not and to state once and for all whether the building is fit for occupation.

Mr. Martel's claims do raise one question about Government's function. Mr. Martel claims that Government refused to accept the report, presumably because of the further bad public relations that would ensue, not to mention the added costs of remediation ? on top of what has already been done.

But, assuming that Government's arbitration case with Pro-Active will be going ahead shortly, one would have thought that the report would have been like manna from heaven in demonstrating that Pro-Active (which must have done at least some of the work now being criticised since the project was supposedly 80 percent completed when it was fired) had been incompetent and had to be dismissed.

So why would it be shelved? The public is entitled to answers.