regulations many of which go unenforced. Some are sensible but some are put on the books in response to a short-term outcry, never to be used again.

Yet right now there are any number of things which would seem to be to Bermuda's advantage and about which very little seems to be happening. We get promises and we get committees but it seems that we get very little action.

Too often these improvements are bounced from Government department to Government department and back again because decisions are not made or are delayed for fear of upsetting one or two voters. Everyone has to put their oar in and by the time they are all through just about no-one remembers just what the original intent was.

Where are we with allowing sidewalk cafes in Hamilton which just about everyone thinks would be an attractive addition to the City? It is being studied but surely it is a relatively simple matter which should have been implemented before the summer of 1997. We may now have to wait until the Summer of 1999 by which time the visitor figures may well have declined further.

Traffic. Everyone knows the roads are a nightmare and that we have a committee studying traffic. That's fine as far as it goes. But we have been promised traffic cameras and more advanced radar guns and they do not seem to appear.

Yes, let's have a report on traffic but we do not need to wait for that before we have traffic cameras. Is it money? We waste plenty of that on things which are far less necessary. These cameras might also cut down on what seems to be a growing number of criminal offences committed by people using cycles.

We are still waiting for a new signs law which was promised way back when Gerald Simons was Minister of the Environment. What could possibly take so long to make a decision on signs? We had a perfectly good and sensible law which we failed to enforce. These days many people, even some new sign painters, do not know what the law is.

We are examining the liquor licensing laws. Quite why we are doing that is a mystery since huge amounts of work were done on the law by the old National Alcohol and Drug Agency but that work went into the same old bottom drawer and was ignored. We clearly need new laws and it is time to hurry up.

In a modern tourist resort we have to sort out the vexed problem of Sunday trading and such things as deliveries and road use on Sundays and holidays.

Licences to sin seem very old fashioned in 1997. We protect the churches from Sunday trading yet we block off the streets for road races thus preventing people from getting to church. That makes no sense whatever.

We talk about Mental Illness Awareness Month and the rights of people to medical care and social services yet the streets of Hamilton have any number of people who clearly need some form of medical health care and receive very little.