Sir Bob Geldof hit the nail right on the head when he said that the e2 million allocation for aid to help countries tackle irregular immigration was “a

pittance”.

It is still only June and so far, Malta has already received 900 or so irregular immigrants this year, and with boatloads arriving every day, the tide shows no signs of abating.

In 2005, this tiny speck of an island received 1,822 irregular immigrants and this year seems to be heading for a new record.

Malta must push its case harder. We acknowledge that the government has pressed very hard for more aid, repatriation agreements and resettlement, and has to a degree succeeded.

But more needs to be done. The government needs to push its position even further because although parliamentary secretary Tony Abela said that the situation is under control, which it is at the moment, one can predict that it will get much worse as the summer goes on.

One understands that it is not easy to maintain the momentum for such an aid petition, but the government must stick to its guns and perhaps lobby with more sympathetic countries in the EU for a bigger uptake of the burden-sharing principle.

Malta desperately needs help to deal with this problem. It might sound as if the country keeps harping on the same old tune, but the fact of the matter is that Malta is the gateway to Europe. Before accession, the European Commission and the European Union itself used to trumpet this fact, so they do actually acknowledge it.

In a recent interview with this newspaper, Maltese MEP Simon Busuttil spoke of a twin-pronged initiative he is trying to push through the European Parliament that should help alleviate the burden.

Dr Busuttil insists that the problem cannot be solved by simply throwing money at it, but in terms of funding, he is pushing for two measures that are being discussed in the EP.

The first is for an immediate emergency fund to be made available as from this year. This would create the possibility for the EU to trigger the use of funds in emergency situations. As matters currently stand, three boatloads of immigrants, carrying a total of 300 people, have landed in Malta in the space of a week.

This state of affairs, Dr Busuttil argues, must be put to an end by ensuring EU emergency funds are readily available should such an instance reoccur.

Secondly, Dr Busuttil favours the insertion of similar emergency mechanisms into the four separate funds on immigration created through the 2007-2013 EU budgetary package – the repatriation fund, the integration fund, the external borders fund and the refugee fund.

It is clear – and this newspaper has repeatedly stated so – that this is not just Malta’s problem. It is the whole of Europe’s. There are enough ways to keep pushing Malta’s cause. The government can, of course, negotiate with the European Commission and also on a bilateral level. But our MEPs, all of them, have an important role to play.

The press, of course also has a role to play by continuing to highlight the problem. Europe acknowledges that it is a problem – a very large and long-term one. But the fact is that very few individual countries have taken action. The longer Europe drags its feet on the issue, the more the problem will escalate. One must also remember that there is a large NATO force in the Mediterranean that has various objectives, including patrolling to deter boat people. The fact that they are patrolling and that immigrants continue to arrive in their hundreds shows that the problem is not merely constant. It is escalating and will continue to do so until something concrete is done about it at EU level.