Tag Archives: Martin Daly

The use of technology to ‘spy’ on citizens has been high-profile news because of continuing charges and counter-charges about what terms and on whose authority spyware has been purchased from Israeli sources, and also about who was being spied upon. As usual, material issues have become blurred as Government, Opposition …

If I wanted to make my mother Celia steups, I would tell her that Sparrow was better than Kitchener. Of course I did not mean it because I became a Carnival piong when they both ruled town. This column focuses on Kitchener because this year is the 100th anniversary of …

Marshall McLuhan, Canadian educator and philosopher, published work in 1964 which became fundamental to understanding the media in the electronic age—even though electronic communication, as we know it, had not yet been invented.  He created the famous phrases ‘global village’ and ‘the medium is the message’. McLuhan posited, in summary, …

Nestor Sullivan was modestly described as manager of Pamberi Steel Orchestra when we lost him at the beginning of this month. My few precious interactions with him and his cool, dry witticisms caused me to become aware that he was a tireless presenter of scholarly but practical papers on the …

Ghosts of commissions past have appeared in response to the Prime Minister’s decision to have a commission of inquiry into the deaths of four divers on 25 February, while they were working on one of the pipelines of Paria Fuel Trading Company (Paria). It was a wise decision of the …

“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 …