Recently, two of our MEPs have been elected deputy leaders of their respective parties. What does this mean? Do they perhaps doubt the sustainability of the European Union? Only they can answer these questions. One thing is certain – the squabbles between the member states do not augur well for the Union.

It seems to me that the millions of euro showered on member states have done nothing to benefit them. In fact all the states that gained most from EU funds have fared badly.

Take Ireland, for example. I travelled from Dublin to Waterford in the 1990s with an Irishman and on the way he explained what this money had done for Irish farmers. Busy farmers had been turned into lazy louts with big houses and flocks of sheep.

The EU gave them a subsidy of £25 for every sheep they owned every year just for grazing the flocks. Of course the sheep increased and multiplied and the farmers became richer every year. My friend told me that in Ireland vegetables were no longer grown but were imported. So much for EU help.

It seems that this disaster happened in other countries too. France and Italy took the utmost from the EU by way of subsidies. Look at them now, with the largest deficits in the Union.

Subsidies just make a nation lazy and unproductive. We in Malta have received hundreds of millions in EU grants and we were made to spend millions of our own money, so that our national debt has increased by a billion euro in the last five years. Of course, we have some decent roads, we are going to have a new Parliament which the government hived off to a “special purpose vehicle”. These loans have done nothing except to make politicians think they can spend and spend.

When will we come to our senses? Will we elect a government that is sober, low-profile and not prone to boasting? Labour leader Joseph Muscat would like the day after the March 9 election to be a normal working day and not a disaster day. We will need to get down to clearing up the huge mess and remember that we Maltese are hard workers and can succeed in correcting the mistakes of the past five years.