Opposition Leader Ralph Thorne has suggested that some of the money spent on last week’s We Gatherin’ celebrations at Archer’s Bay, St Lucy, on Errol Barrow Day could have been allocated to cleaning up the environment.
Charging that Barbados was “a very untidy country”, Thorne told yesterday’s sitting of the House of Assembly: “You cannot drive through a street now and find that it is tidy, so that a Government that clearly has access to lots of money needs to understand how to allocate those resources and revelry cannot be important as tidiness.”
His remarks were made during debate on a resolution to adopt the Report of the Joint Select Committee (Standing) on the Social Sector Environment, piloted by Attorney General and Minister of Legal Affairs, Dale Marshall.
Marshall said the report was “an examination of the scheme that the Government wants to put in place to ensure the way that Barbadians keep premises that are under their responsibility.
He added the regulation attempted to establish a scheme setting certain standards approved by public health authorities to give Barbadians something by which to measure their surroundings.
The Joint Select Committee was chaired by MP for St George North Toni Moore and included Opposition Senator Andre Worrell, whom Marshall thanked for “being willing and so generously participating in the deliberations of the committee and for his tremendous support.”
Thorne suggested it was now time to consider a comprehensive piece of legislation on matters of the environment.
He took issue with one of the three recommendations in the committee’s report in particular, which called for “public education through the use of the Government Information Service (GIS) for community sessions, whereby the first principles off cleanliness is next to godliness would be enforced.”
The Opposition Leader questioned why the committee did not seek to engage the services of Government’s newly created Public Affairs Department, which he contended had been “ foisted on the people of this country,” for this role.
“The Government Information Service spent many years representing and reflecting the work of the Government…the people of Barbados are now curious as to why we have paid for a Government Information Service for many years and still create another department called Public Affairs, with its abundance of consultants,” Thorne said.
He asked: “If we have the Government Information Service as represented by this report, why is there a need for an arm that is probably intended to do the same work of the GIS?”
Thorne noted the report “makes no reference to the Public Affairs Department, because there is Government’s own recognition that the mandate of the Public Affairs Department is qualitatively different.”
(GC)
