So what should we do? Should we start organizing Air Malta trips from Tripoli to ferry migrants to Europe?

Bombing smugglers’ boats is one of the dumbest ideas I have heard in a long time.

It will make the trip even more dangerous.

Smugglers will either try to mend battered boats or quickly build new ones, resulting in vessels which are even less seaworthy than the ones which regularly drown between Malta and Libya.

And as for Malta’s bluster, it’s so embarrassing. The prime minister was quick to tell us that Malta will not fight Islamic State in Libya because, you know, they will fight back, but it is now acting tough against fishermen, who will probably not retaliate when their boats are bombed.

A really valiant army we have right there.

Let’s face it, no boat is marked ‘MIGRATION BOAT’, so unless a boat is being used, it is hard to tell who it belongs to and what its intended use is.

And I’m sure that ownership and use changes over time anyway.

Maybe smugglers steal fishermen’s boats or maybe the smugglers themselves are also fishermen.

This plan is really not well thought out and I hope it falls through.

There is only one solution to this mess. Europe should re-launch an even bigger and better Mare Nostrum and save as many lives as possible.

Let people migrate. It is human to do so. Europe can take it and the migrants will adapt to living in the EU.

Yes, you will if the trouble is less than the trouble at home.

It’s all relative.

That is why they continue to leave Malta in droves.

Your argument that ‘we are a small island’ makes no sense in this context. Not all Maltese people are middle-aged and entrenched, or elderly and with no options, or unmotivated and barely literate.

Well-educated people in their 20s don’t think in terms of being confined to a small island while keeping the immigrants out to have more space for themselves. They think in terms of an entire continent and even beyond.

I would have been exactly the same at that age. I would have packed up and left – and not because of the immigrants, but because of the Maltese.

Not really – you’ve forgotten what happened after the end of the Vietnam war, which is how we got the term ‘boat people’.

And in 1956 alone, a quarter of a million Hungarians fled across the border into free Europe.

Within sub-Saharan Africa itself, the movements of people have been massive because of war and strife.

There hasn’t been such a massive movement of people since the partition of India in 1947.

Simple mathematics and hard economics will tell you that Europe couldn’t possibly continue to absorb such numbers indefinitely and without limit.

Everything is finite and if saturation point has not been reached, it will be reached at some point.

Tough as it might seem, Africans need to put their house in order and the people migrating from African countries could contribute to build up African economies, at least in those countries which are stable such as Ghana, Ivory Coast etc.

The situation with people fleeing the ravages of war, such as Syrians, is different but even refugee status was originally intended as a temporary measure not a permanent state of affairs.

Admittedly, the situation is complex and there is no one simple solution. What is imperative is that lives be saved and those saved be treated in the most humane manner possible until such time as their destiny is decided.

The rest is vanity and stupidity. However, given that most Maltese people are nihilistic (yes, they really are), it is practically impossible to persuade them that it is not the acquisition of things behind the barriers of selfishness and self-absorption that makes life meaningful.

People’s perspective is skewed because they forget (or never knew, because of their ignorance) that massive movements of refugees are normal and standard. The 20th-century was rife with such movements, the world over.

Hence my attitude: I remember far too many of them. Syria? Nothing new to those who remember the civil war in Lebanon and the huge numbers of refugees pouring out of the country in the 1970s, many of whom arrived in Malta.

By not stopping the traffickers not only are many people, in their hundreds and even thousands dying at sea but it is also allowing the very situation these people are trying to escape from to happen. Its a never ending circle.

The UNHCR, the NGOs and all the other liberal do-gooders are not going to put a stop to all the problems that Libya and countries south of it are facing and in the case of the well funded NGO’s they probably don’t even want to put a stop to it.

Destroying the smugglers will eventually lead to immigrants avoiding Libya all together and seeking refuge in alternative places which whilst not as ideal as Europe as they won’t get all the freebies that we paid for with our taxes at least they will be safe.