KINGSTOWN, St. Vincent, CMC – The St. Vincent and the Grenadines government says it will provide housing on Union Island for citizens who are still living in rented accommodation on the mainland as a result of Hurricane Beryl’s passage on July 1, 2024.
Prime Minister Dr. Godwin Friday said that returning the residents of Union to their homes and getting businesses operating again are essential for the continued recovery of the island. “And we have addressed and are addressing this problem as a government and cabinet,” he said.
“We have had conversations with the Minister of Housing and the Minister of Education as to how we are going to ensure that those persons can go back to their communities.
“For those who are from the Southern Grenadines, primarily Union Island, to make arrangements for them to find housing there, because that has been the problem. But they don’t have housing here on the mainland either, unless they are renting accommodations at guest houses.”
Thousands of people from the southern Grenadian islands of Mayreau, Canouan, and Union Island were displaced when Hurricane Beryl tracked across the Southern Grenadines, damaging more than 90 per cent of buildings there.
Many of the displaced people moved to St. Vincent as the then Unity Labour Party (ULP) government repaired their homes. However, Friday, who led the New Democratic Party (NDP) to victory in the November 27 general election, has repeatedly decried the pace of recovery as too slow.
“So, the question is that now that you have the electricity back on, the roads are cleared, telephones, everything is working, the community is back to normal. Why not relocate those persons to Union Island, which is where they prefer to be?”
Speaking on a radio programme here, he said it was understandable that this could not be done in the early days after the cyclone.
“But those communities have been rebuilding. They’ve reached a point now where people can be accommodated back in Union Island. So that is what we are going to do. We are working on that very, very feverishly in our administration.”
As part of the recovery effort, the former government had refurbished the former Teachers’ College campus in Arnos Vale on the mainland to house students from the two primary schools and the secondary school in Union Island.
Most of the students have since returned to their campuses on Union Island, while others have enrolled in other schools across the country.
Friday said that the school at Arnos Vale has “one or two people in a class. The new government has decided to integrate those students into other schools and close down the campus.
“And then those persons who wish to return, which will be most of them, that we will provide the accommodations that we are doing here, why not do it there?”
Friday, however, said this will take “a little time, unfortunately, because the past government should have been doing that to begin with.
“The whole notion that you could just simply leave people here and in limbo, you’re not providing any food, you’re not providing jobs for them. … sometimes the rent is not being paid, and they’re just there in limbo; that is something that we are going to address
“And it’s better to take the persons from there, if we have to provide similar accommodations, or to build the prefab houses, so that we can house those persons temporarily, back in their communities.”
He said that the previous government had imported about 100 prefabricated houses, noting that the bulk of the order is yet to arrive in the country.
“But there have been some problems, I’m told, with the construction and putting them in certain areas where they’re not flat land and so forth. It’s been problematic. So, we have to review.”
Prime Minister Friday said he had spoken with Minister of Housing, Andrew John, about the situation and “we have to review how that programme is going to unfold, whether we go ahead with it or we change and say let’s build here using materials that we have here and so forth”.
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