The Prime Minister said this morning he was embarrassed to read certain e-mails he received on illegal migration.

He said during an interview with Francesca Vella, from The Malta Independent, that he told those who wrote these e-mails that the immigrants were people too, that the Maltese were proud of their values and that they should live such values.

He urged the Labour Party to do the same with such e-mails.

Dr Gonzi said that earlier this week he lobbied with a number of European Prime Ministers requesting their country’s support to Malta's bid to host an asylum and care office.

The Prime Minister spoke on energy prices saying that oil had to be paid for so the solution was to have a system which fluctuated according to oil prices and urged people to be careful about consumption.

Energy consumption in the past months, he said, had gone down eight percent showing that people were being more careful.

He said that Malta should not make the mistake of depending on an infrastructure which operated only on only one source of fuel to produce energy.

Other countries faced major problems at the beginning of the year when Russia closed the gas pipeline to the extent that certain factories had had to close.

So a strategy which utilised different sources was needed to ensure that Malta would not be caught without energy, he said.

The government, the Prime Minister said, would be explaining the different mechanisms that would be used to finance different energy projects.

Studies on the wind strength and direction had started in the north of the island and if these studies showed that a wind farm at Sikka l-Bajda was viable, a call for tenders would be issued.

The private sector would operate the farm and the government would buy the energy.

An interconnector, he said, was important not just for the country to buy energy but also to sell any unused energy it produced.

The Prime Minister referred to recent statistics which showed that Malta was 9th with least number of people looking for work from among EU countries. This, he said, was a huge achievement especially since a good number of people had been made redundant in the past year and more than 3,000 had entered the workforce.