When we joined the EU, and even before, the country was very interested in the workings of the Union and the media used to send up its representatives to the summits, with some help from the government.

Then it all became rather hackneyed and the media spent most of the time sitting around in one room and mostly bitching about absent colleagues. Then when the Council was over, we all congregated in a designated room to hear the prime minister give his own take on the meeting, in a hurry because the plane was waiting.

And that was it. We reported what the prime minister said verbatim, without contextualising. Then we were free to follow our own devices until we got on the plane the next day and back to Malta.

We learned nothing and our readers learned nothing.

Now last week there was a special Council meeting which was also addressed by Ukrainian President Zelensky. As far as I can see there was no media from Malta so all we have to go by was a tweet by the prime minister who spoke about supporting Ukraine by humanitarian aid.

We don’t know if the prime minister met Zelensky or even shook his hand. On Sunday Abela made some anodyne comments about how bad it is to fight. Malta’s condemnation of the invasion is still like slapping with a feather just like Viktor Orban, for instance, does.

Fortunately other media were more forthcoming. The Italian website Tele Italia which normally expresses support for Giorgia Meloni spoke of the Italian challenging the EU leaders like Charles Michel and suggesting that he takes himself off to bed when he tried to force the pace and cut short what Meloni wanted to say.

Worse was to come when Macron too wanted to cut short the meeting and said that all the points she was raising had already been settled by the representatives. In a steely voice she reminded ‘Emmanuel’ that the decisions are to be taken by the leaders of government in the Council and not by the representatives. Her humiliation of the French President did not go unnoticed.

The meeting continued and ended at 3am until all her points were addressed. I note that so far Abela does not seem to have met Meloni even if she flew over the Maltese airspace on her way to Libya and he often holidays on Italian or Sicilian territory. What can they say to each other?

Now no one expects the prime minister to replace the absent Maltese media and report on the workings of the Council. Tele Italia also reported this week that Meloni is working to replace Ursula Von Der Leyen with Roberta Metsola and thus create a Centre-Right Commission just as the European Parliament now has a Centre-Right majority.

All this is being kept hidden from the Maltese population. What is not being kept hidden is what Malta is doing in this month in which our country is presiding over the Security Council of the United Nations. But even here the information is being turned on its head and you won’t get a peep from the Maltese media even if they have sent people to New York maybe with government help.

When the world is concerned, alarmed and worse about the situation in the Ukraine and things are getting uglier by the minute this small country in the big seat is worried about.... the rising levels of the sea, last heard about in the time of Arvid Pardo.

The website PassBlue expressed what many people are thinking – the discordance between Malta worrying about rising sea levels and the invasion of a sovereign country by a superpower. On 24 February, on the anniversary of the invasion, the Security Council is due to debate the invasion. Don’t lose any sleep on this.

It’s only Malta once again looking silly on the international stage with Robert Orban and Ian Pardo.

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