Tag Archives: Martin Daly

“How sleep you now, unfeeling kings? Does one human feeling creep through your hearts’ remorseless sleep?”   These were the words of the poet Percy Shelley challenging suppression of the working class. There are no words strong enough to condemn the cruelty of the management of Paria Fuel Trading Company …

Views reportedly expressed by the well-qualified presenters at a webinar, entitled ‘Hosting and managing the Carnival Experience in Trinidad and Tobago in 2022 and Beyond’, converged with much of what I have been writing concerning Carnival and cultural development matters over several years, including last Sunday. The Trinidad Express newspaper …

‘Covid-19 will force us to re-build our economy,’ I wrote nearly two years ago, in April 2020. ‘We should place our vibrant performing arts at the core of the recovery agenda, not merely with the disproportionate focus on one transitory carnival season, which we may not even have in 2021. …

Our country has been widely shamed internationally by the Trinidad and Tobago Coast Guard’s fatal shooting of an illegal migrant baby.  The use of the label ‘accident’, the premature ducking of responsibility and due process as well as the crude, partisan political exchanges have compounded the shame. For the moment, …

The government has decided to permit gatherings to participate in the limited forms of Carnival celebrations that it has belatedly decided to promote this season.  Perhaps it should drop the ‘safe zones’ pretence. Such zones may not be workable with the freeing-up and ‘leggo’ of Trinidad and Tobago Carnival.  There …

The current Government, having voted in Parliament for the appointment of Gary Griffith as commissioner of police (CoP) on the occasion of his first appointment, clearly no longer wished to have him returned to that office. This should not have been a problem. Griffith had been appointed on a fixed-term …

One of my compères, who hails from the south-west peninsula and who has retained the good sense rooted in many areas of our country, was dismayed at the outset by the approach of the government when the Prime Minister declared  Government’s intention to make vaccination a requirement for persons employed …

Cabinet members Stuart Young, Clarence Rambharat and Marvin Gonzalez are to be commended for taking a public stand on legislation regarding the sale and use of fireworks—in disagreement with the proposed legislation with which the Attorney General is taking centre-stage. The AG has again gone out on a limb, unaccompanied …

The People’s National Movement (PNM) campaigned obsessively in the Tobago House of Assembly (THA) elections  on the issue of the suitability of Watson Duke for office, and lost comprehensively.   Days later, it began trying to discredit the winning party by reference to Duke’s alleged conflicts of interest. The court …

We begin 2022 in the midst of times of intense uncertainty, at least equal to that of wartime but probably bigger because every country in the world is simultaneously a theatre of upheaval. Moreover, the uncertainty is not just a generalised one about the future; it is an uncertainty about …

Farley Augustine and the Progressive Democratic Patriots (PDP) have interrupted the alarming descent of Trinidad and Tobago into an authoritarian one-party state and I thank them for that. Having comprehensively routed the incumbent People’s National Movement (PNM) in the Tobago House of Assembly elections, in the backyard of its leader …

Nearly three months ago, in a column published on 5 September, I called on the Government to consider legislative options in the face of the Delta variant threat. I wrote as follows: ‘Given the low rate of vaccination, our population is wide open to death or hospitalisation from the Delta …