The Barbados Labour Party (BLP) has been blamed for the many issues currently facing the Psychiatric Hospital.
Speaking in Parliament this afternoon, MP for Christ Church East Denis Lowe chastised the former administration for building a $400 million prison, saying they ought to have been paying more attention to the mental institution.
Minister of Environment Dr Denis Lowe.
“When Barbados had a chance to correct some of those things, rather than fixing the hospital, we were building a $400 million prison. That’s what we were doing.
“When we had a chance to address some of those issues. We had a chance to spend some of the money there,” Lowe emphatically stated.
The Minister of the Environment charged that when Glendairy Prison was damaged by fire in 2007, the BLP could have saved millions of dollars by repairing the affected section.
The money saved, he argued, could have been used to help upgrade the Black Rock facility.
“When the Glendairy prison supposedly burnt down, it was only an area of the prison that was damaged and could have been fixed. Rather than building a $400 million prison, what was wrong in isolating the damaged area of that prison and fixing it?
“I know that there have been challenges at the Psychiatric Hospital, I know that there are needs for improvements as they would be in any age-old institution.
“But what I also know is this: None of the challenges which we now experience at the Psychiatric Hospital were birthed post-2008. They must have been there long before,” he said.
Lowe said it had become a habit of the BLP to sit down and criticize everything the ruling Democratic Labour Party did.
However, he pointed out that members of the Opposition party had made some questionable decisions during their time in office.
“I am saying that if we are so evangelical today in telling the Government with what is wrong, there is nothing wrong with telling the Government your perception with what is wrong, but I am saying, and I say it all the time, that when a man chooses to point a finger of accusation against another man, he should first check himself.”