With all this hurly-burly chaos of the election campaign, news from international fora which may have an impact on Malta gets more often than not lost in the confusion.

Many of us may have heard, for instance, about David Cameron’s plan to hold a referendum on the UK and the EU, but very few can have linked this news to Malta.

However, the referendum in 2017, will most probably take place when Malta will have the Presidency of the EU. Malta’s six-month presidency is followed by the UK itself and it would seem impossible to visualise a British government holding such a sensitive referendum during its own presidency.

Hence Malta. It will be on Malta’s watch.

Generally speaking, people in Malta have not woken up yet to the 2017 presidency which is now less than four years away. We have heard much about the 2018 when Valletta will be the Capital City of Culture in Europe, but hardly anything about the 2017 presidency.

Seeing we are engrossed in a very keen election campaign, many might have mentally consigned the preparations for the presidency to the incoming administration, as is only fair.

But many of us have simply no idea how complicated, how difficult, how taxing it is for a member state to hold the presidency.

There are meetings to be presided over. The current Irish presidency, for instance, has some 1,650 meetings scheduled for this semester, apart from other meetings that may crop up.

Most of these meetings will be presided over by civil servants, rather than politicians.

And the chairmen have to be fully conversant with the matter under discussion and trained to sound out the opinions of members before the meetings and to bring the meetings to a successful conclusion, to bridge between opposing positions, to mediate, to negotiate, and so on.

It will all be a very tall order for Malta in this first time it has the presidency.

Just consider this British question. According to what David Cameron said in his recent speech, first he must win the coming 2015 election (not a foregone conclusion), and then he intends to negotiate with the member states to repatriate powers from the EU back to Britain. This phase, from 2015 to 2016, will be very complicated and fraught with danger of huge differences creeping in. Then there will be, according to Mr Cameron’s own timetable, the referendum.

In the system that will henceforth be used by the EU, the current holder of the presidency will be aided and supported by two other member states who will be occupying the successive presidencies. In Malta’s case, for instance, Malta’s civil servants will be helped by the British ones.

But the preparations must start immediately, at least immediately after the election. We just cannot afford to become a laughing stock in Europe because we persist in considering only one half of the country as being able to tackle anything and the other half simply not existing.

We simply cannot afford to hold down the presidency, and do well at it, with just half the country. We need all the best men (and women) on board and helping out.

There is preparation that will have to wait till the very eve of the presidency but there is also a much more important preparation that will have to begin now, or rather, that s hould have begun months or years ago. We are already quite late.