The Daly Commentaries Volume 2 (2016 – 2023)

Description

Martin Daly’s outrage over the lack of care of those in high office and high status for the less fortunate, and the tragedies that result so often from that indifference are voiced in the lacerating commentary of his Sunday Express columns. The pages of this second volume of the Daly Commentaries burn with precisely articulated rage and scorn for those who have stolen or squandered the patrimony that should be channelled into this country’s future-its young people. “How sleep you now, unfeeling Kings?” he is given to asking —in those words, borrowed from Shelley, and in his own cutting phrases.

It is for the young that he reserves his undying empathy. For them he finds the energy and ingenuity to offer a lifeline for those cut adrift by an education system that leaves them with no viable skills and no prospects more alluring than a life outside the law.

Like most of us, Daly is alarmed and personally affected by the surging crime rate. Unlike others, he chooses not to retreat behind ever-higher walls, to distance himself physically or emotionally from the coarse and alienating realities.

Rather, it’s his continuing contact with young people, through another passion that fills much of his writing — the steelband movement— that lets Martin Daly retain his optimism that a brighter future for Trinidad and Tobago is still within reach. With that other great poet, calypsonian Black Stalin, he believes:
“We can make it if we try.”

“Martin Daly has established his credentials as an unpaid legal resource to the media and the public it serves, especially in matters involving the Constitution, governance, transparency and accountability. Such generosity on the public’s behalf makes him a stand-out.”
-Sunity Maharaj