Paul Doyle’s plan to transform Skeete’s Bay into a bustle by building a restaurant to complement the others he owns located at the Crane Hotel has had to be shelved. Doyle has Mac Fingall to thank for putting a spoke in his wheel. It is a little over a week Mac went public with his concerns about Doyle’s Skeete’s Bay Culpepper Beach Houses project – Mac Fingall And St. Philip Residents ‘Fighting Back’ To Protect Their Way Of Life At Skeetes Bay which is pending Town Planning approval.
Since this project was forced to the public at the Town Hall meeting held at St. Catherine’s Sports Club, an obvious public relations job has been triggered in the local media. Pat Hoyos’s piece in the Sunday Sun [19/02/2012] titled ‘Ragga ragga Mac’ caught the eye today when he attacked Mac Fingall for vocalizing his concerns that Barbados was fast becoming a concrete jungle. To quote Hoyos, he labelled Mac’s protestation about how he viewed development in his parish as ‘one of the most awful anti-development rants I have ever heard’. After reading Hoyos’s article it became obvious Mac Fingall was operating at a level which left Hoyos in his wake. It is obvious Mac’s reference to slavery had to do with the outcome if Barbadians continue to sell and allow ‘others’ to develop our finite resource, the land! The result will be that these fields and hills we call our own today will not be ours tomorrow.
What intelligent Barbadians gleaned from Mac’s position about the West and South coast taking the form of concrete jungles, is to question whether such a policy is sustainable. What is the social cost of continuing with the policy? It has absolutely nothing to do with being anti-development and the St. Philip posse wanting to guard their way of life. To support Mac Fingall’s concern one only has to look at how Spain having invested billions in its tourist product is struggling mightily to attract tourists today. Today’s tourists are also spending less.
One of the freedoms enjoyed by the BU household is that we have no advertisers or sponsors to brown nose. We do not own a Who’s Who magazine which is dependent on the business community for its success. We can write how we freely feel on the issues. Pat Hoyos was out of line to ridicule Mac for expressing concern about how the pace of development has impacted the lives of Bajans.
Development at what price Mr. Hoyos?
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