Ali­cia Llanos

Min­is­ter of Cul­ture and Gen­der Af­fairs Mar­lene Mc­Don­ald is ap­peal­ing to the na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty to stop mak­ing bac­cha­nal about the Na­tion­al Acad­e­my for Per­form­ing Arts (NA­PA).

Speak­ing yes­ter­day dur­ing the post-Cab­i­net news con­fer­ence at the Diplo­mat­ic Cen­tre, St Ann's, she said: "I want to say to the na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty and those crit­i­cis­ing, stop mak­ing bac­cha­nal over the space (NA­PA). In­stead go and cre­ate work for the space. "The Gov­ern­ment has in­vest­ed hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars in a state-of-the-art the­atre...Let us en­joy the space, let us use the space as a peo­ple and stop mak­ing bac­cha­nal," she added.

Mc­Don­ald said she was tired of peo­ple crit­i­cis­ing and caus­ing "con­fu­sion" over the fa­cil­i­ty.

Her out­burst was pro­voked by re­porters' ques­tions as to how much any ad­di­tion­al work on NA­PA would cost. Mc­Don­ald said she did not have a fig­ure for ad­di­tion­al work be­ing done but in­sist­ed that crit­i­cisms over the $20 mil­lion fa­cil­i­ty come to an end. Ad­dress­ing ques­tions, she said the build­ing was still un­der a one-year war­ran­ty, which ex­pires in No­vem­ber this year. She said any ad­di­tion­al costs as­so­ci­at­ed with al­ter­ations would be cov­ered by Shang­hai Con­struc­tion, the com­pa­ny con­tract­ed by the Ur­ban De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny of T&T (Ude­cott) to build NA­PA. Mc­Don­ald ad­mit­ted that the Gov­ern­ment was "still test­ing the build­ing" to en­sure all of it's fa­cil­i­ties were up to stan­dard.

She said the up­com­ing NA­PA fes­ti­val that starts to­mor­row was ex­pect­ed to be ben­e­fi­cial in the Gov­ern­ment's as­sess­ment of the build­ing. Mc­Don­ald said all feed­back from both the per­form­ers and pa­trons would be con­sid­ered in the over­all as­sess­ment of the build­ing. When asked who would cov­er any in­fra­struc­tur­al ex­pens­es af­ter the war­ran­ty had ex­pired, she point­ed out that NA­PA fell un­der three min­istries. She said that the Min­istry of Trade and In­dus­try, Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy and Cul­ture and Gen­der Af­fairs were all stake­hold­ers in NA­PA and would there­fore be fi­nan­cial­ly re­spon­si­ble for the build­ing.

Mc­Don­ald al­so said that the NA­PA fes­ti­val was proof the fa­cil­i­ty was be­ing used, con­trary to ac­cu­sa­tions that it was not be­ing utilised.