The arrival of 95 irregular immigrants on one inflatable dinghy could be of grave concern if the strategy is kept up.

Immigrants normally arrive in Malta in numbers of 11 or 28 – depending on the size of vessel launched. This allows a bit of leeway for closed detention centres to make room for the new arrivals – not an easy task when you already have, for example, 800 people awaiting asylum at the Safi Barracks detention centre.

In order to move people out of the compound, their application for asylum or humanitarian status must be processed and approved, or they are released after having spent 18 months in custody.

But it is very clear that if the new strategy is to send over boatloads of 100, then we could be headed for very stormy waters. If, say, we are used to one or two boats a day – that gives us a maximum of 60 arrivals – but if we were to receive two of these dinghies, it could mean up to 200 arrivals per day. No doubt, aside from the material cost (which would become astronomic), there is a cost in bed space and human resources. The centres would be under pressure, and the head of the Detention Service would no doubt put more pressure on the asylum application process in an effort to speed it up to make more room.

Judging from the photographs taken yesterday, there is no way that the dinghy in question could have made it all the way over to Malta from Libya or anywhere else for that matter.

The occupants of the dinghy looked relatively smart and clean and they looked in good health. It is pretty much obvious, even to the untrained eye, these people did not set off from the coast. It could be a one off, but it seems that the modus operandi was that of a mother ship setting the dinghy down. The dinghy was intercepted two miles off Delimara and is understood to have still been fully loaded with fuel. Quite how the occupants of the boat expected to get to mainland Europe is beyond comprehension. The boat was overloaded, it was sagging and the edges were far too close to the sea.

It is also perhaps even more difficult for the Armed Forces of Malta to intercept these so called mother ships – all it takes is a hold and you are ready to go – set sail from home port and drop the migrants off slap bang in the middle of the Mediterranean. No one would really be the wiser. There is still at least two months to go in this ‘migratory season’ and you can bet your last euro that the trips will increase in frequency as we approach and enter August. The Maltese Government has time and time again pressed its case for burden sharing but if it keeps up at this tempo, then the country is going to need more marine assets.

The current crop of AFM sea craft and aircraft are simply not enough for the job. Case in point being the day when the Marsaxlokk fishermen went missing – two boats were headed out to Lampedusa. Malta is seriously going to need help if migrants keep arriving in these numbers. Hopefully, this was one isolated case, but we shall wait and see.

In the meantime we hope that someone is looking into this change of tactics – it would be foolish to simply trust in wishful thinking.