As the annual festival season kicks off across Saint Lucia, a long-running debate over the dual use of the island’s limited sports infrastructure for entertainment events has reemerged, pitting two senior government ministers against each other on resource management and national priorities. The topic was raised by reporters during Monday’s pre-Cabinet press briefing, where Youth Development and Sports Minister Kenson Casimir and former sports ministry senior official Dr. Ernest Hilaire laid out starkly conflicting visions for how the country’s public venues should be utilized.
The core of the debate stems from a long-standing logistical challenge facing the small Caribbean island: limited available recreational and event space, a shortage that grows particularly acute during the annual Jazz and Carnival celebrations. To accommodate high demand for event venues, most of Saint Lucia’s existing sports grounds are regularly repurposed for concerts, parades, and other large entertainment gatherings. This constant multi-use has accelerated wear and tear on many facilities, most of which already were in need of major repair work before the added strain.
Casimir, who is serving his second term as the cabinet minister overseeing sports and youth affairs, doubled down on his long-held stance that all public sports venues should be reserved exclusively for athletic activities. He pointed to recent damage sustained at the Soufriere Mini Stadium, which was recently used for a non-sporting entertainment event, as evidence of the risks of multi-use policies. “This has been the conviction from my heart and mind… I don’t want anything but sports at a sports facility. That’s my position,” Casimir told reporters.
The minister noted that his stance has drawn widespread criticism online and in public discourse in past years, but he remains firm in his view that the island needs to do more to protect athletic infrastructure. “If at the end of the day we have those sports facilities being used in a very expedited fashion, get it back to usability for all the programmes that we have for sports. That’s my position. We have seen a lot of effort since I made my pronouncement and got slaughtered and dragged through social media and elsewhere. We’ve seen the concerted effort to do this more, but I believe, at the end of the day, we can do more.”
Referring to the damage at Soufriere Mini Stadium, Casimir added that while event organizers have pledged to complete repairs to bring the venue back to sporting standard, the incident underscores deeper systemic issues. “It’s still early days, so we’ll see how that works out. But I believe until we understand what sports is doing for this nation, we [will] continue to have these issues.”
Hilaire, who served as permanent secretary in the Ministry of Education and Sports during the planning and construction of the island’s iconic Daren Sammy Cricket Ground (DSCG), argues that a flexible multi-use model is not only practical but necessary for a small island nation with constrained public funding. Globally, multi-use sports venues that host everything from concerts to community gatherings are standard practice, and Hilaire says Saint Lucia can adopt the same model with intentional, proactive management.
“I believe as a small island state, we have limited facilities, that is the truth. And it comes down to a question of management. How do we manage the use?” Hilaire explained. “You want surfaces that you can use for multiple purposes, and it takes very little to restore them. And that’s just what we have to do.”
He even revealed that the Daren Sammy Cricket Ground was intentionally designed from its inception to host large entertainment events, noting the venue’s amphitheater-style northern stands, built specifically to provide optimal viewing for concert stages, with corporate boxes to accommodate premium guests. “We actually designed the DSCG for the purposes of concerts. The northern stands are shaped like an amphitheatre; two huge northern stands. We didn’t build a huge southern stand, we didn’t build a huge western stand. We built two northern stands with corporate boxes to the top. If you look at the shape of it, it was designed in an amphitheatre style, to allow us to have concerts there. So persons can rent boxes at the top, looking down at a stage.”
Hilaire emphasized that building separate, dedicated entertainment venues for every community across the island is financially unfeasible for Saint Lucia. “We do not have the resources for every community to have a cricket field, a football field, and an entertainment venue of that size that can host 6,000 people, like in Soufriere. As a country, we just cannot. When your venue is for the international level, you become a little more circumspect how you use it, especially if you have sporting events right after. You don’t want to destroy it, and you cannot host events. But you have to be a little open-minded, and you have to invest in a facility where it has versatility, so it allows you to have multiple events with minimal damage and disruption.”
Building purpose-built versatile infrastructure that can safely host multiple types of events, he argued, is the only practical solution to avoid forcing event-goers to travel long distances to a single central entertainment venue in the capital Castries. “What are you going to do? Spend $20 million on an entertainment venue in Castries, and when Dennery wants an event, everybody must go to Castries? In other words, you have to build a Dennery field in a way where it allows you to have mass crowd events there, and that’s my thinking on it. So I agree we need to be very respectful of athletes and sporting use, but we also have to understand we don’t have the resources to have dedicated facilities.”
As Saint Lucia’s entertainment and sports sectors continue to grow, driving increased demand for public event space across the island, the debate over how to balance competing needs for access to infrastructure remains unresolved.
