Pub­lic con­sul­ta­tion on fire­works re­form will be­gin to­day. At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Faris Al-Rawi told Guardian Me­dia, “We will be dis­patch­ing ma­te­r­i­al to mul­ti­ple stake­hold­ers and on our (so­cial me­dia) pages, we will then in­vite sub­mis­sions on pro­pos­als and will then set meet­ings.”

Those meet­ings the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al con­firmed will be done via a vir­tu­al plat­form. Al-Rawi said he thought the ‘Zoom’ plat­form works well and is al­so the “fastest way to get pub­lic en­gage­ment.”

Al-Rawi said the ma­te­r­i­al that will be made avail­able for pub­lic con­sid­er­a­tion to­day will be the Gov­ern­ment’s draft leg­isla­tive pro­pos­al. He con­firmed that the Cab­i­net has al­ready dis­cussed its con­tents but giv­en that the use of fire­works is a po­lar­iz­ing top­ic in this coun­try, asked that it now come to the pub­lic for dis­cus­sion.

Al-Rawi said laws gov­ern­ing fire­works use is in dire need of up­dat­ing as they are very an­ti­quat­ed.

Speak­ing pre­vi­ous­ly to Guardian Me­dia on the pro­posed leg­is­la­tion, he said, “this is part of a larg­er pack­age, re­mem­ber we passed the An­i­mal Wel­fare leg­is­la­tion which touched on the use of fire­works al­ready, what we are do­ing now is har­mo­niz­ing this, we don’t think it is ben­e­fi­cial for the po­lice to run around and charge peo­ple one by one.”

Among oth­er things the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al said the leg­is­la­tion aims to re­strict the use of fire­works in cer­tain ar­eas tak­ing in­to con­sid­er­a­tion if there are near­by hos­pi­tals, homes for the aged or a zoo. The leg­is­la­tion will al­so seek to lim­it the use of fire­works to cer­tain days and at spec­i­fied times.

This comes af­ter a New Year’s Day tragedy in Quar­ry Street, Port-of-Spain where 25 peo­ple were left home­less af­ter a fire al­leged­ly start­ed by a sky lantern burnt down four homes. A day lat­er the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al re­spond­ed to a tweet on Twit­ter ask­ing if the Gov­ern­ment will con­sid­er ban­ning loud fire­works by In­de­pen­dence Day. The tweet went on to say that Old Year’s Night was rough on pets and pet own­ers. Al-Rawi re­spond­ed pub­licly say­ing “I spent my New Year’s night mak­ing sure my dog sur­vived the night. I’ve al­ready draft­ed a bill which cab­i­net has ap­proved for pub­lic con­sul­ta­tion.”

Asked at that time if in fact this year’s In­de­pen­dence Day will see the draft Bill be­come law, Al-Rawi said if there is an ap­petite for the law then it will be a mat­ter of im­me­di­a­cy.

Ques­tioned about the tim­ing of Gov­ern­ment’s in­ter­ven­tion, Al-Rawi said the leg­is­la­tion was in the works for quite some time, “at the Of­fice of the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al we took a look at this via the Law Re­form Com­mis­sion, we did a pol­i­cy pa­per and a draft law based on Joint Se­lect Com­mit­tee work then we de­vel­oped a pol­i­cy pa­per and bill that went to Cab­i­net in De­cem­ber 2021.”