Opposition Senator Keisal Peters says many of the people now living in tents in the Grenadines following the passage of Hurricane Beryl in 2024 do not have property or access to housing.
“And I can attest to Union Island in particular,” Peters said during the 2026 Budget debate.
She was responding to the parliamentary representative for the Southern Grenadines and Minister of Higher Education, Grenadines Affairs, Local Government, Airports and Seaports, Terrence Ollivierre, who said there were still people living in tents on Mayreau and Union Island 18 months after the storm.
He said that the situation on Union Island was so bad that one of the hard courts was occupied by people living in tents.
The area was now being referred to as “Tent City,” Ollivierre said.
As a result, the Union Island Secondary School was unable to participate in the local schools’ netball championship.
“And I had to go to them and say you have to find a place to live because you are depriving the community the use of the hardcourt,” the MP said.
Ollivierre challenged the previous Unity Labour Party (ULP) administration — which was voted out of office in the November vote — on its statements that a significant portion of homes had either been fixed or reconstructed.
Ollivierre further contested this, saying that based on the numbers provided to him by the Deputy Prime Minister, St. Clair Leacock, of the number of people still living in paid-for accommodations on the mainland, then not very many people had their living accommodations sorted out.
But Peters explained that while she served as Minister of National Mobilisation, Social Development, Family, Gender Affairs and Persons with Disabilities, she was a member of a subcommittee for resettlement set up by the former government following the passage of Hurricane Beryl.
The senator added that many of the now-affected people on Union Island moved down from the mainland for work.
“And what we found was that a lot of landlords used the opportunity to evict their tenants in the wake of the storm…” the opposition senator told Parliament.
“For them, it was divine intervention. So many persons found themselves without property to go back in,” Peters said.