I see where there was heat­ed de­bate in Par­lia­ment over com­ments made by Diego Mar­tin North/East MP Colm Im­bert on the state of rivers in his area. Im­bert was straight to the point, out­lin­ing the lack of dredg­ing and de­silt­ing of the Mar­aval, Diego Mar­tin and Debe rivers by Works Min­is­ter Jack Warn­er. Im­bert sup­port­ed his claims with pho­to-graphs, which even­tu­al­ly got him in­to trou­bled wa­ters with the Speak­er, re­sult­ing in him hav­ing to leave the cham­ber.

In re­ply to the ques­tion, Warn­er was all over the place with a litany of rea­sons as to why the for­mer Min­is­ter of Works was now on the op­po­si­tion bench­es. He was at pains to point out the height of the MP and made a com­par­i­son with the height of the silt in the rivers, much to the de­light of gov­ern­ment mem­bers.

At the end of it all, the ques­tion is still to be an­swered as to why these rivers were not cleaned ahead of the rainy sea­son? Any­one look­ing at any of these rivers will see what Im­bert was re­fer­ring to. With the rainy sea­son up­on us, it is on­ly a mat­ter of time be­fore our "su­per min­is­ter" will be here, there and every­where with an­oth­er spin on what caus­es flood­ing. The Coun­try Club wall which came crash­ing down near­ly a year ago and was to be re­built in "no time" is a re­minder about Warn­er's promis­es.

With rainy days be­ing here again, I look for­ward to more en­ter­tain­ment from Warn­er.

C Pe­ters

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