I, for one, take great exception to Cordell Riley’s cynical and negative assessment of the importance of the America’s Cup to Bermuda.

In a column widely published, he says it is adding “to an already strong racial undertow” in Bermuda.

He says that the Government has made arrangements to hold it here in order to improve the One Bermuda Alliance’s chances at the next election.

He dismisses the many enthusiastic welcoming statements made when the news was announced as “platitudes”.

And he compares our situation with Nelson Mandela’s support of the 1995 World Rugby Cup in South Africa, asking “Can AC35 be the nation-building event in Bermuda as the World Rugby Cup was in South Africa?”

“The symbolism may not be all there for the Bermuda version but some of it is. Blacks in South Africa had suffered for 50 years under apartheid, Blacks in Bermuda 400 years under white-minority rule.”

We went after the America’s Cup as an economy-building event, in order to help Bermuda recover from the terrible damage inflicted by a combination of the worldwide recession and financial mismanagement by successive Progressive Labour Party governments. Mr Riley, the facts, uncomfortable though they may be for you and some others, are there for all to see. The PLP dropped the ball, causing thousands of Bermudians to lose jobs, take-home pay and opportunities, and they continue to feel the pain of that period of bad governance every day.

The Government has formed an event-governing committee whose job in part is to make sure that the fruits of the America’s Cup, which are expected to be substantial, are not hoarded by a few, but spread as widely and as fairly across the community as possible.

Bermuda’s economic and social recovery is the goal to which the Government has dedicated itself every working minute of every working day since a frustrated electorate handed it the reins of government late in 2012.

It is a huge and difficult task... we have made no secret of that. Bermuda has been living beyond its means for many years. We have an enormous burden of debt to carry on our shoulders.

But we’re getting there. The “spluttering” of economic indicators that Mr Riley dismisses with disdain in his article, is the sound of recovery, fainter than we would all like, perhaps, but there nonetheless.

We have accomplished a great deal in the two years we have been working for Bermuda’s recovery. And as all of Bermuda is aware, we have done it against a background of non-stop invective from the PLP and its supporters, a cacophony of complaint, exaggeration, abuse, falsehood and off-the-wall behaviour that seems to have become their stock-in-trade.

A typical case in point – describing the winning of the 35th America’s Cup as an effort contributing to a racial undertow in Bermuda!

Instead, the contribution to racial undertow is being made by Mr Riley himself.