Martin Daly

When Abraham Lincoln said that you could not fool all of the people all of the time, he could not have known that information technology would come to bear heavily on both the ability (fake news) and inability (investigative reporting) of the powerful to fool the people. Lincoln would be …

Following last week’s column on the self-esteem crisis, which looked at the circumstances which contribute to the breeding of heartless persons, I was reading an interview with a rape victim who has written a debut novel entitled Dark Chapter. The book explores the traumatic experience of the author, Winnie Li, …

For many years I have described the low self-esteem plaguing many of our youngsters and its relationship to violent crime and anti-social behaviour.  The now widespread fighting in schools is a related phenomenon. Much of my personal knowledge of the self-esteem crisis comes directly from dialogue with some youngsters to …

I have to return to the prevailing conditions of instability which are obvious to me but now as a post-script to my tribute to Roland Quesnel, my revered teacher, a contemporary of mine, Randolph Peters, wrote that, like me, the person who most impacted his intellectual development was Quesnel. He …

There are co-incidences in life that it is sometimes difficult to treat merely as co-incidences. My revered teacher died on Wednesday last, aged 90. Some years ago, he sent me a document entitled My Last Will with a request that I keep it for him “as an official document.” This …

The annual reading of the Budget is a ritual. It is real only in that it determines what will be the cost of living in the short and medium term.  This year it imposed additional taxes intended to replace evaporated energy sector revenue in order to prop up a lifestyle, …

Dominica, I am sorry. I choose to say that in the patois of the headline of this column, consistent with the linguistic expression of Dominica’s national motto: Après Bondi, C’est la Ter—After God, it’s the Earth. Now, after Hurricane Maria, Dominica’s beloved Earth is a debris dump—its fertility disrespected by …

One thing that is more fake than fake news is VVIP status in Trinidad and Tobago—but sadly we pay out of the Treasury for the political and social botox that supports the fake status. Within the past fortnight, five Caribbean islands have been devastated and half a dozen others have …

Fifteen years ago, shortly before becoming a columnist—as a guest speaker at an event organised by the late Lloyd Best—I characterised our political contests as a fight for the national cash register. I also asserted that in politics you can lawfully t’ief, based on the way the State enterprise system …

Even as we were crossing Eastern Parkway opposite the Brooklyn Museum there was a brief warning. None of us making our way to Brooklyn Panorama last week Saturday into the grounds of the museum took the warning entirely seriously; but we should have. Two hours later, when we were drenched …

Reaction to last week’s Mayaro resumed column was as I expected. Readers welcomed and want more of “feel good” topics that bring some relief from the anxiety afflicting all but the one percent and the mindless fete people. This column is a postscript, but I must acknowledge reality first. People …

I wrote this column sitting adjacent to Mayaro beach enjoying a slice of the August holidays. It is about two hours  to sunset on as glorious a day as it gets in this piece of paradise. A little earlier in the day I had—unusually for me—a daytime snooze, on the …