Kali­fa Clyne

In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor Ian Roach said yes­ter­day he would not hes­i­tate or have trou­bled thoughts over what would serve the pub­lic in­ter­est in the on­go­ing de­bate over the Con­sti­tu­tion (Amend­ment) Bill 2014.His com­ment came dur­ing the sec­ond day of de­bate on the con­tentious bill and even as oth­er sen­a­tors re­vealed they had been heck­led and jeered by pro­test­ers while leav­ing the Par­lia­ment Build­ing on Tues­day dur­ing the first day of the de­bate.

Not­ing, too, the pub­lic con­cern and the heavy me­dia cov­er­age of the is­sues sur­round­ing the bill, Roach said:

"Let me state cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly that such me­dia cov­er­age or, for that mat­ter, any of the pub­lic pleas and lob­by­ing of the sanc­ti­ty of the Con­sti­tu­tion did not at all cause me any ap­pre­hen­sion or fear what­so­ev­er.

"In­stead, it served to mo­ti­vate me and raise my aware­ness even fur­ther of what is at stake de­bat­ing the bill and the con­se­quences should I ig­nore or ne­glect the sig­nif­i­cant and re­lent­less out­cry from the pub­lic that the said bill is passed in­to law, if that be the case, with­out the care­ful and mi­cro­scop­ic scruti­ny."

He said he had been read­ing ar­ti­cles pub­lished in the news­pa­per with "fer­vor and de­light­ful in­ter­est" and had lis­tened to per­son­al views from or­di­nary peo­ple on the street on what they hoped he would do or not do to pro­tect the peo­ple from an ap­par­ent­ly deaf Gov­ern­ment in­tent on do­ing what they like, when they like and how they like.

"Now, can I as a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the peo­ple giv­ing them a voice in the af­fairs of Par­lia­ment, al­though vic­ar­i­ous­ly ap­point­ed, ig­nore those voic­es or con­sid­er them in­tim­i­dat­ing or threat­en­ing?" he asked.Roach's views were some­what sim­i­lar to those ex­pressed by Sen­a­tor Dhanayshar Ma­habir, who said he would not be si­lenced. He too said he was booed by cit­i­zens wait­ing out­side the Par­lia­ment when he left the build­ing.

"The re­al­i­ty is that there is a great deal of heat in the na­tion­al pop­u­la­tion and it is im­por­tant for there to be a bit of light," he said.Ma­habir said he had al­so tak­en ma­jor ex­cep­tion to a news­pa­per sto­ry which ques­tioned which In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor would be "the Ju­das".

The T&T Guardian al­so learned that Dr Rolph Bal­go­b­in, who sig­nalled on Tues­day his in­ten­tion to sup­port the bill if Gov­ern­ment was will­ing to make rea­son­able changes, was al­so jeered as he left the House and sought a po­lice es­cort to his ve­hi­cle. Yes­ter­day, how­ev­er, Bal­go­b­in de­nied that hap­pened.Iron­i­cal­ly, there were no huge crowds out­side the Par­lia­ment yes­ter­day rais­ing their voic­es on the con­tro­ver­sial bill. A few of them fil­tered to the venue lat­er in the day but the num­bers of Tues­day were not re­pro­duced.