Now that Pres­i­dent Chris­tine Kan­ga­loo and Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley have re­ceived the Com­mis­sion of En­quiry re­port on the Paria Fu­el div­ing tragedy, there are the all too ob­vi­ous calls for the re­port to be made pub­lic.

Most vo­cif­er­ous on these calls thus far have been the Oil­field Work­ers’ Trade Union (OW­TU), one of the at­tor­neys rep­re­sent­ing the fam­i­lies of LM­CS divers Fyzal Kur­ban, Kaz­im Ali Jr, Yusuf Hen­ry and Rishi Na­gas­sar, who lost their lives in the 2022 tragedy at Berth No 6 in the Pointe-a-Pierre har­bour, and the Op­po­si­tion UNC.

No doubt, CoE chair­man Jerome Lynch KC’s claim that he al­so be­lieves fam­i­lies of the vic­tims at least de­served some sort of com­pen­sa­tion long be­fore the end of the 21-month CoE ex­er­cise, would have added more fu­el to that ar­gu­ment.

Of course, giv­en the mag­ni­tude of the in­ci­dent, the pub­lic would be well with­in its right to de­mand that the re­port is pub­licly dis­closed. This is be­cause al­though the hear­ings were car­ried live on tele­vi­sion, the com­mis­sion­ers would al­so have gath­ered in­for­ma­tion and con­duct­ed oth­er in­ves­ti­ga­tions out­side of those live sit­tings, with oth­er crit­i­cal stake­hold­ers in­volved in the mat­ter, be­fore com­ing to their con­clu­sions and rec­om­men­da­tions in the 380-page re­port.

But have we not been down this road be­fore?

In­deed, there are many CoE re­ports which have nev­er seen the light of day af­ter be­ing com­plet­ed by sim­i­lar pan­els set up to seek the truth in pub­lic in­ter­est mat­ters. These doc­u­ments usu­al­ly end up col­lect­ing dust on the shelves of gov­ern­ment min­istries and even the Di­rec­tor of Pub­lic Pros­e­cu­tion’s of­fice, if there are find­ings of crim­i­nal neg­li­gence with rec­om­men­da­tions for fur­ther ac­tion.

In fact, truth be told, pub­lic clam­our­ing for such re­ports to be re­leased is what has spawned the act of re­leas­ing “redact­ed” or “sani­tised” re­ports on these ac­tiv­i­ties, which al­ways cost mil­lions of dol­lars to the tax­pay­ers, with­out them ever re­al­ly see­ing the full ben­e­fit of such ex­pen­di­ture.

The fact is, how­ev­er, that no mat­ter how you lay it out, this coun­try does not have a his­to­ry of tak­ing any ma­jor ac­tion against any­one found cul­pa­ble of ne­glect or malfea­sance at the end of such en­gage­ments. In­deed, the in­for­ma­tion of­ten­times mere­ly be­comes am­mu­ni­tion for politi­cians to use against each oth­er on the is­sue of cor­rup­tion dur­ing elec­tion plat­forms.

At the end of the day, how­ev­er, no mat­ter what is even­tu­al­ly di­vulged from the re­port, it will not take away from the fact that four men lost their lives while that of their sur­viv­ing col­league Christo­pher Boodram has been ir­repara­bly dam­aged.

In the mean­time, should the is­sues raised in the re­port re­lat­ed to health and safe­ty that led to this un­for­tu­nate in­ci­dent not be ad­dressed, T&T leaves it­self open to see­ing oth­er such oc­cur­rences in the fu­ture.

This news­pa­per thus be­lieves it is in­cum­bent on the Gov­ern­ment to en­sure that at least key as­pects of the re­port is made pub­lic, so that we do not have sim­i­lar oc­cur­rences, es­pe­cial­ly where loss of lives may oc­cur, in fu­ture.