Leader of Gov­ern­ment Busi­ness Dr Roodal Mooni­lal has de­fend­ed the Gov­ern­ment's de­ci­sion to spend mil­lions of dol­lars in this year's In­de­pen­dence Day cel­e­bra­tions, say­ing fig­ures on Gov­ern­ment spend­ing will be made avail­able to the pub­lic in due course. He was speak­ing in re­sponse to crit­i­cisms from protest­ing Moru­ga res­i­dents that mon­ey was wast­ed on flags while hun­dreds of peo­ple suf­fered be­cause of dan­ger­ous land­slips which claimed hous­es and roads. How­ev­er, dur­ing a brief in­ter­view, Mooni­lal, al­so Min­is­ter of Hous­ing, Land and Ma­rine Af­fairs, said spend­ing was jus­ti­fied. "It was the 50th an­niver­sary and one had to ex­pend re­sources for a prop­er and ap­pro­pri­ate cel­e­bra­tion. If we did not, an­oth­er seg­ment would have con­demned us for not recog­nis­ing this his­toric event with the ap­pro­pri­ate fan­fare. We can­not please every­one."

He said the com­plaints of the Moru­ga res­i­dents would be ad­dressed in a time­ly man­ner. With re­gard to state­ments made by Op­po­si­tion Leader Dr Kei­th Row­ley in his tele­vised ad­dress last Fri­day, Mooni­lal said the cel­e­bra­tions in­spired pa­tri­o­tism through­out T&T. He said: "I have tak­en note of the com­ments raised by the Op­po­si­tion Leader and con­trary to his as­ser­tion, we all wit­nessed an ex­plo­sion of pa­tri­o­tism dur­ing the pe­ri­od of In­de­pen­dence cel­e­bra­tions. "These were trig­gered ini­tial­ly by the tremen­dous achieve­ments of our Olympians led by the gold medal­list, Keshorn Wal­cott." He added: "I was par­tic­u­lar­ly in­spired when I saw through­out T&T, par­tic­u­lar­ly in rur­al ar­eas, the red white and black of our na­tion hoist­ed at homes, busi­ness places, cen­tres of recre­ation and re­li­gion. "Peo­ple of all races, re­li­gion or creed came out and as­sert­ed their na­tion­al­ist spir­it. I was pleas­ant­ly sur­prised to see so many peo­ple mo­bilised through­out the length and breadth of T&T in sup­port of our na­tion."

Mooni­lal al­so crit­i­cised Row­ley for ab­sent­ing him­self from some na­tion­al cel­e­bra­tions dur­ing In­de­pen­dence. He said: "The Op­po­si­tion Leader who speaks about dis­uni­ty and in­com­pe­tence chose to at­tend two par­ty func­tions, one at Bal­isi­er House and one at the con­stituen­cy of Arou­ca/Mal­oney. "They had a re-en­act­ment at Bal­isi­er House, which I thought was ir­rel­e­vant since they are per­ma­nent­ly liv­ing in the past. So there was no need for the PNM re-en­act­ments." In his ad­dress Row­ley said par­ents and lead­ers had failed to set the right ex­am­ples for young peo­ple. He re­flect­ed on some of what T&T had achieved since be­com­ing a sov­er­eign state on Au­gust 31, 1962 and ques­tioned where it was head­ing. Row­ley added that a good place to be­gin the trans­for­ma­tion need­ed in so­ci­ety was at the lev­el of the Par­lia­ment.