Martin Daly

Pan music has always said to me “let me love you” and I have responded “I will love you for a thousand years”. Last Sunday, in the Savannah, the melodic single pan bands performing in Pan Down Memory Lane category preceded Pan in the 21st Century and lyrics like those …

There is a new example of political truth being stranger than fiction. It is that it takes two very wobbly Attorneys General to make a distrusted Opposition look good. When it was not trying to pretend that the outcome of the recent case in the Privy Council (the PC) was …

As football fans know, VAR stands for Video Assistant Referee. This is the additional refereeing team that uses technology located immediately adjacent to the field of play to assist the match referee to review, when necessary, certain match-changing decisions. These decisions include goals, penalties and direct red-card incidents. I thought …

The Roman Emperor, Nero, is said to have fiddled while Rome burned. His alleged conduct passed into common parlance to mean “not dealing with a difficult or dangerous situation but instead doing useless things or pretending nothing is wrong”. In our current situation, fiddling with runaway violent crime includes the …

When a public official who has undoubted legal power exercises that power, a question of the legitimacy of the exercise of that power can arise. Legitimacy concerns the exercise of legal power in a manner that is appropriate and justifiable and does not otherwise disturb the public conscience. Our governments …

As long ago as 2007, readers of this column were introduced to the phrase “breakdown of ordered legal control in the face of anarchy or banditry” as I began my predictions about where we were headed. The phrase belongs to Professor HLA Hart, who was a famous professor of Jurisprudence …

The speakers at the handover ceremony of the new Despers pan theatre on Monday last, failed to connect the dots between the new theatre and the revitalisation and rebranding of downtown East Port of Spain. The Prime Minister expressed an expectation that the theatre would be a public asset available …

During an Easter Sunday break from my column, I was forcibly struck by the disconnect between the official messages about Easter from those clothed with high constitutional authority and the grim reality on the ground. Many persons would have been engaged in pleasurable activities over the Easter weekend. However, the …

Of course I am delighted that our new and seventh president, Her Excellency Christine Kangaloo, advocated for the panyard development model as a means of dealing with youth at risk in her inaugural address. For more than a decade, I have been advocating for the model’s recognition while describing real …

Persons in public life frequently exercise power without accountability. As President Paula-Mae Weekes was recently demitting office, we were reminded of the fate of the merit list for the appointment of a commissioner of police that was prepared by the Police Service Commission—but which was, in August 2021, diverted from …

I have a friend who I will call Jarndyce, to protect his identity and save him from victimization. His story is this. Jarndyce is in his sixties and suffered a major failure of his eyesight in January 2020 as a result of glaucoma, which is a clandestine destroyer of sight—because …

The inquiry “yuh get thru?” is commonplace. It means: did you succeed in completing the business or personal transaction you were attempting to do with a third party? The transaction is usually one involving access to a service and the path to such success is routinely frustrating and stressful. Unless …