PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

Could the re­cent up­surge in un­em­ploy­ment po­ten­tial­ly lead to an in­crease in the so­cial­ly dis­placed?

This was the ques­tion, and the warn­ing posed by chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of the Em­ploy­ers Con­sul­ta­tive As­so­ci­a­tion CEO Stephanie Fin­gal dur­ing the min­istry’s meet­ing with the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty con­cern­ing its on­go­ing ef­fort to ad­dress the is­sue of street dwelling in the coun­try.

Fin­gal said there had al­ready been signs de­pict­ing the im­pact of cut­backs and clo­sures of busi­ness­es across the coun­try through the vis­i­ble in­crease of peo­ple turn­ing up to beg at shop­ping cen­tres and malls.

“With the cur­rent state of re­trench­ment we are see­ing an in­flux of peo­ple in malls, for in­stance I live in Cen­tral, who are now ha­rass­ing peo­ple with­in the car parks ask­ing for mon­ey and all of those things. Some of those peo­ple will prob­a­bly end up as home­less peo­ple,” said Fin­gal, “I see a prob­lem you know sort of es­ca­lat­ing if par­al­lel to deal­ing with peo­ple who are al­ready home­less we don’t put some­thing in place to ad­dress the rate of un­em­ploy­ment vis a vis per­haps find­ing out if peo­ple are hav­ing is­sues.”

Fin­gal not­ed the ag­gres­sive na­ture of the those seek­ing aid in those shop­ping cen­tres af­ter the per­ma­nent sec­re­tary of the Min­istry Vi­jay Gan­gaper­sad point­ed out that the home­less pop­u­la­tion could pose a health risk to wider pop­u­la­tion both through their lack of health care or in some cas­es their men­tal state de­te­ri­o­rat­ing to the point that they lash out as had been seen pre­vi­ous­ly.

“We have our of­fi­cial may­ors and gov­ern­ment are be­ing thrown with law­suit from time to time as a re­sult of be­ing ac­cost­ed by peo­ple who are street dwellers. We have a young la­dy who was strug­gling on a wait and see game to see if she would be able to see in her left eye af­ter be­ing struck by a street dweller,” he said.

How­ev­er, pres­i­dent of the Down­town Own­ers and Mer­chants As­so­ci­a­tion Gre­go­ry Aboud said thank­ful­ly re­ports of such at­tacks have not been heard for some time at least in the cap­i­tal of Port- of- Spain.

“I don’t know where that la­dy got her face bust­ed or how long ago that was Mr Gan­gaper­sad, but I could say from the city of Port of Spain that we haven’t had a re­port of an at­tack on any civil­ian or pedes­tri­an or any­thing for quite a num­ber of years. We have not,” he said.

Aboud, who was al­so rep­re­sent­ing the Trinidad and To­ba­go Cham­ber of Com­merce at the meet­ing, al­so took the op­por­tu­ni­ty to ex­plain that his sug­ges­tion last week con­cern­ing Car­ni­val, as well as DO­MA’s in­volve­ment in these meet­ings were not mere­ly to serve the in­ter­est of the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty.

“This is a hu­man­i­tar­i­an prob­lem as you al­lud­ed to, this is a cri­sis of con­scious so to speak for our so­ci­ety to at­tend to what is taught to us in cat­e­chism the least among us. To those who ac­tu­al­ly ac­cord­ing to that same cat­e­chism have a much bet­ter chance of en­ter­ing the king­dom of heav­en than any of us sit­ting in this room by their po­si­tion in so­ci­ety. So we are here to try and as­sist in that re­gard,” he said, “I say that be­cause I had a re­cent ex­pe­ri­ence in want­i­ng to rec­om­mend some­thing about Car­ni­val and all of a sud­den I be­came a vam­pire, or a soucouyant in the eyes of many in­clud­ing jour­nal­ists in the pa­per.”

The min­istry has pro­posed to in­tro­duce as­sess­ment and re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion homes for the so­cial dis­placed as they seek to move away from the use of River­side Plaza which has long been seen as less than ad­e­quate lo­ca­tion for the so­cial­ly dis­placed.