Jesse Ramdeo

Se­nior re­porter

jesse.ramdeo@cnc3.co.tt

Fire­works Coali­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go (FACTT) co­or­di­na­tor, Roger Mar­shall, is ac­cus­ing At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Regi­nald Ar­mour of aban­don­ing his role re­gard­ing leg­is­la­tion on fire­works use.

Dur­ing an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, Mar­shall said af­ter Ar­mour’s last up­date near­ly a year ago, con­firm­ing that a cab­i­net note was be­fore a sub-com­mit­tee tasked with im­ple­ment­ing gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy on the pub­lic’s use of fire­works, there has been no ad­di­tion­al in­for­ma­tion.

“We have writ­ten him sev­er­al times since that, at least three or four times via let­ter and email, and he has not re­spond­ed to any of that cor­re­spon­dence for the last year. At this point, cit­i­zens are an­gry; we are fu­ri­ous be­cause there is a pub­lic out­cry with the lack of in­for­ma­tion and lack of feed­back from the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al. As far as we are con­cerned, he has aban­doned his re­spon­si­bil­i­ties and left cit­i­zens in the dark to face these dan­gers alone,” Mar­shall said.

There are height­ened con­cerns, giv­en that fire­works have be­come a fix­ture for end-of-year cel­e­bra­tions. Mar­shall said for near­ly a year, the or­gan­i­sa­tion has been in lim­bo over plans to reg­u­late the dis­charg­ing of py­rotech­nics.

“Let me just say that with­in hours of them start­ing the re­tail sales of fire­works in Mar­aval and Diego Mar­tin, peo­ple were re­port­ing that fire­works were al­ready be­ing set off, so we are ap­peal­ing to the cit­i­zens to show com­pas­sion and en­cour­age your friends and fam­i­ly not to use fire­works in res­i­den­tial ar­eas or near farms or an­i­mal shel­ters, hos­pi­tals, nurs­ing homes, and places like that. We need to set the ex­am­ple.”

He said an­i­mals and vul­ner­a­ble groups con­tin­ued to suf­fer from the loud and sud­den ex­plo­sions of fire­works while those in au­thor­i­ty turned a blind eye.

Mar­shall al­so said he had since penned a let­ter to Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley, call­ing for his in­ter­ven­tion in the mat­ter but was yet to re­ceive a re­sponse.

“We had to turn to the last re­sort, which is call­ing on the Prime Min­is­ter to in­ter­vene be­cause the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al has cer­tain­ly aban­doned his re­spon­si­bil­i­ty; he has done noth­ing and giv­en us ab­solute­ly no feed­back of hav­ing done any­thing, so we’ve asked the Prime Min­is­ter to in­struct his cab­i­net and his At­tor­ney Gen­er­al to get some­thing done to safe­guard the pop­u­la­tion against the fire­works.”

He al­so fired back at re­marks from Fire­one Fire­works CEO An­dre Abra­ham, who called for tol­er­ance as it per­tained to fire­works. 

“Maybe we need to see who is ben­e­fit­ing from the sales of fire­works; who is prof­it­ing from it?” Maybe that will get us clos­er to the an­swer for why noth­ing is be­ing done,” he said.

“An­dre Abra­ham, in his press re­lease, made it sound as if he was in dis­cus­sion with the Gov­ern­ment to man­age this whole fire­works in­dus­try.”

Ef­forts to con­tact AG Ar­mour for a re­sponse were un­suc­cess­ful up till news time.