This is an open letter to the Prime Minister and the Opposition Leader.

I appeal to you both, to put your differences aside and work together to ensure appropriate and life-saving amendments are immediately made to the Summary Offences Act regarding the indiscriminate explosion of fireworks, so as to protect the population from the deleterious impact.

As I pen this correspondence to both of you this evening, December 26th, there have been repeated explosions in various residential areas in Diego Martin.

It’s extremely jarring to the nerves and for people who are elderly and infirmed: a terrible nuisance, amounting to basically noise terrorism. Dogs are breaking out of their enclosures and running wildly in the streets. Question: Who let the dogs out? Answer: Fireworks bombardment galore, seemingly supported by the state.

It’s time to say enough is enough! Mr Prime Minister you can put immediate interim measures in place to end this scourge, pending the passage of enlightened legislation, as was done with the scrap iron industry.

It’s time for you to end what seems to be the overriding influence of the fireworks importers on this critical matter, which results in hundreds of lost animals every year and countless maimings and deaths of dogs. Our zoo animals are assaulted every year, both on Old Year’s night and at Independence.

Where in the world are fireworks exploded on the doorsteps of a zoo? Apparently in Trinidad and Tobago, a real place.

Where is your basic empathy and compassion Mr Prime Minister and Mrs Leader of the Opposition? When will the decades’ long cry of those calling for the proper regulation and sale of these incendiary and disturbance to the peace devices be heard? Shame on you both for your continuing deafening silence!

History will note your collective failure and note interestingly enough that this was one of the few things that you both actually seem to agree on, as evidenced by your collective inaction; in respect to the continuing largely unregulated use of fireworks, throughout the nation’s districts and towns. Have a heart, for God’s sake!

MICHAEL JATTAN

Diego Martin