Those scenes have shown to what extent the people of this country are divided when it comes to asylum seekers. The most prevalent reaction has been one which expressed anger at what happened but was immediately followed by expressions of irritability or worse with regard to the asylum seekers. There were two extreme opinions – there were those who came out with racist remarks and those who sided completely with the asylum seekers.

It is now time to bring the whole issue into synthesis and to introduce a measure of sanity into the whole discussion. The past days have shown how quickly those who are out to incite racial hatred have sprung to public attention and how easy it was for them to attract crowds and support.

Contrary to what some claim, there is no such thing as a “pure” Maltese breed (one could perhaps argue that there is no such thing as a pure Aryan breed, but that is beside the point). The Maltese, both in language and in genes, are a syncretic race, which has thrived precisely because it is syncretic.

It can also be proved that in recent years, the mix of people on these islands has continued and the net was cast far wider than in the past decades. It is sufficient to examine, for instance, the list of people who are fined by traffic wardens to realise how many non-Maltese surnames one finds there. One can also examine the phone book and gauge the extent to which non-Maltese residents have increased.

It does not seem as if this increase has attracted public attention, contrary to other countries such as Italy. What has created such a negative feeling among vast swathes of the Maltese population are the asylum seekers, both those who are in detention but also, to be honest, those who are in the open centres.

It is a fact, that Malta has had more than its fair share of asylum seekers and will probably continue to have them, perhaps in greater numbers if Malta becomes the EU’s southernmost frontier and, as said in this paper last week, a Border Patrol Agency is set up in Malta.

All the solutions that are continually put forward by those who are against the asylum seekers are either nonsense or else make little sense. It makes no sense to say that we should repel them at sea and push them back. It makes no sense to say we should allow them to continue on their way to other parts of Europe.

The only humane solution is to keep them in decent surroundings, and to hasten the time when they can be classified as refugees and sent to other countries or repatriated.

The government must continue with its policy of detention, despite UNHCR’s strictures. One notes, inter alia, that Michael Howard’s proposals as regards illegal immigrants, published last week in the UK, includes:

• Withdrawing from the 1951 United Nations Convention on refugees, which obliges countries to accept people being persecuted on the basis of need, not numbers

• Introduce laws to allow the immediate removal of asylum seekers whose claims were clearly unfounded because they came from safe countries or had destroyed documents

• Detain asylum seekers without documents so people whose identity was not known were not able to move freely around the UK – a worry for “national security”

• Stop considering asylum applications inside the UK and instead take people from United Nations refugee agency camps. Anyone applying for asylum would be taken to new centres close to their countries of origin.

• The Conservatives also want quotas for those seeking work permits using an Australian-style points system and those wanting to join families in the UK.

Detention must be humane. It is not humane to house them in tents on cold winter nights. It is not humane to give them nothing to do except lie in bed. It is not humane to allow them to survive like that for months without end, with no one telling them what is happening.

There is however, it would seem, a hard core of asylum seekers who have conveniently thrown away their passports and who cannot be repatriated for no one knows what their country of origin is. These have had their appeals rejected time and again, and it seems it is from this hard core that trouble erupts, as witnessed by the continuous insults suffered by the members of the armed forces, and possibly also by the weapons that allegedly are fashioned by the asylum seekers and hidden among their things. The forces of order must be as strict with such people as they would be with any Maltese. The law is there to be observed by all.

At the same time, however, the army must be helped. It is not right for the army to have to suffer the double whammy of seeing its operational budget cut by 18 per cent and its work taken up guarding asylum seekers. Soldiers are not recruited for this and they are perhaps the least suited for this.

All this, however, costs money. The country must be made to see that all this costs money, but the government’s insistence on the amount of money spent on asylum seekers has fuelled racist invective at a time of general government austerity and increased taxes.

There have been social forces, noticeably the Church, which has remained silent on this very moral issue. It is not enough for a church group or two to speak up. The Church has a moral duty to speak against racism.

Racism should be combated, not through repression or through counter-invective, but through persuasion and moral arguments. People must be made to see that racist thoughts and expressions are not a sign of a civilised society. Politicians and political parties have a lot to do in this regard, not just through expelling their members who have openly espoused racist rhetoric but also through educating the people that Malta has to do what is right for the asylum seekers who, after all, are human beings in greater need than us.