The Dutch seem to have an innate gift for trying to be smarter than the rest of us in Europe – and I don’t just mean the amazing engineering structures they have built known as dykes, or their human equivalent so rampant in the red light district of Amsterdam.

Their sense of humour has a bizarre edge to it, which is probably why Malta and the Maltese have unfailingly often borne the brunt of their jokes. Dutch television has, over the years, made fun of the Maltese national anthem and – here with some justification after a digit-perfect 12-1 drubbing in a qualifying match against Spain that had left a furious Holland team adrift – the Maltese national football team.

They have also shown a remarkable interest in the mystifying way we tend to take the Eurovision Song Festival so seriously. On one particular occasion, when the Maltese national jury under my bemused chairmanship had been the only one that evening to give a vote to the Dutch entry, they were more than a trifle intrigued. A Dutch TV crew quickly flew over and first contacted my former broadcasting colleague, Norman Hamilton, then chairman of the Song For Europe Committee, who, I have since secretly believed, must have suspected what they were up to and had wickedly asked me to make it to Mdina in his place for an interview.

There, in the middle of our old and noble capital, I was met by a crew made up of three seven-foot women and two seven-foot men, though it was only the voice that gave their gender away. The presenter looked down at me, gave a wry smile and then asked me in a Germanic tone of English why in God’s name had the Maltese jury felt it should have voted for their country’s song in that year’s festival.

It was at that very instant that it dawned on me that the whole interview was yet another lark to be included in one of their popular humour programmes. And there was I, all pompous in a dark suit worthy of any chairman of the board, feeling like an imbecile and trying to come up with a good reason as a crowd of baffled tourists surrounded us in the Cathedral piazza. To my utter discomfort, some even took a picture to show the folks back home.

There is a Double Dutch connection with Malta. According to Professor Ruut Veenhoven from Rotterdam’s Erasmus University, Malta is the sole leader in the world happiness stakes. His research was published recently in the Journal of Happiness Studies and taken up by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian who reported that the news that the Maltese people are the happiest in the world was, quite appropriately say I, greeted in Malta with “cheerful incredulity”.

There are people who insist that happiness is the result of being too busy to be miserable, which may be very true of the Maltese people’s present mental state, were the findings of the good professor to be taken any seriously. After all, there are only thousands of Maltese who busily cannot find a job and those who find them, often have to accept the insecurity of part-time status.

Happily, there are thousands of others who have either been busily losing theirs or been made to make an early exit from the working world. And thousands more who happily cannot make ends meet because of meagre wages, curtailed benefits and spiralling taxes. All fodder to make people deliriously happy, I guess.

In one of the reactions to the grand announcement of our happiness-chart-topping feat, which I read in a popular blog on the Internet, one Mosta psychotherapist attributed it all to “the factor of religion”, adding that “Malta is 97 per cent Catholic and part of our religion says you have to be happy with what you have. So don’t go running after impossible dreams.”

Now that’s a hysterically happy assessment, no doubt. If the Maltese are really this happy with their lot at this moment in time, then their many saints must have had something to do with it. Another studious Dutchman, Prof. Jeremy Boissevain, has long been an avid observer of the social character of the Maltese and his many published works persist as a source of utter wonder for most Maltese mentors. His book “Friends of Friends” (Blackwell), in particular, shows how we have, over the centuries, been happily dividing our village and town societies over saints and sinners.

When you belong to a nation that purports itself to be more Catholic than the Pope, the happiness just radiates out of your skull. Who the hell cares that we have lost most of our countryside and now threaten the bits that remain like Ta’ Cenc and that we have poisoned our skies and now eagerly seek to suffocate the happy people in places like Marsascala, Fgura, Zabbar, Zejtun, the Cottonera and the rest of the ecstatic south?

As happy Catholics we are also confirming John Lennon’s adage that happiness is, after all, a warm gun. Armed hold-ups occur on a daily basis, but the police, as happy as all of us of course, insist that is no crisis and people should just go on happily with their work, including hunting in restricted areas, creating total traffic chaos every time it rains and joyfully watching our young men and women, like the poor, innocent victims that are presented as veal on the menus of our restaurants, being crammed inside venues for parties where drinks are highly-priced and exquisitely diluted.

If 74 per cent of us have declared themselves to the world as being happy, I dread to think what the sad ones are going through. It reminds me of a silly song they used to play with the credits in one of the old English comedy programmes on television in the early seventies – “Doctor At Large”, a direct descendant of “Doctor in the House”. It used to include words like “I’m h-a-p-p-y, I’m h-a-p-p-y, don’t know the reason why” and, incredibly, the melody is still heard today on the football terraces when the English squad is playing. Considering how much success that squad has had in the past decades since 1966, the tune does sound very ironic.

But all this makes for a very convenient simile of our situation and Prof. Veenhoven’s survey findings. In the happiness stakes, we were co-winners with the Danes the previous year, only to make it on our own to the top this time round. I have tried and will continue to try finding the reason for it. After all, we lose in practically everything else. Perhaps it is the Prime Minister’s toothy smile that is so catching and has triggered all this overwhelming happiness?