“I will continue to stand with so many people on this issue,” Empire actress Grace Gealey said. “The Cayman Islands; my home, my heart, my love.”

It is almost enough to bring tears to your eyes and it should as Gealey is a very talented actor.

I have no problem with her airing her views on her concerns over the controversial cruise berthing facility that the Government said it plans to move ahead with. However, for the majority of Cayman’s media and elsewhere to publish every single emotional word that comes out of her lips or written on Instagram is ludicrous. Especially as not one syllable of it has any value at all. It is just as I said – “emotional”.

“If the island itself could speak to us, what would it say?” Gealey asks.

I don’t know but unlike you I would be pleased if it gave me some facts so I could weigh up its opinion either for or against the terminal.

The media houses, except this one, have been jumping up and down hanging on to everything she says about the cruise ship berthing facility as if she is the number one qualified expert. She is not.

Gealey said she has “tried hard to put Cayman on the map for something other than money laundering.”

Really? I haven’t read that before. CITN/Cayman27 have gone overboard with contacting her. We have to listen to her recorded tearful voice as she gives another of her performances over the air with a photograph of her beautiful face. It is heartbreaking stuff.

She gets more airplay than any qualified expert that really knows something and whose opinion is really worth listening to.

So now we have a march and she encourages everyone to attend it. Will she be there?

Oh, no. She’s busy working. Right. She’s not living here now. Oh. Right.

She says she accepts other people’s views but doesn’t agree with them. Why?

Another of Cayman’s media houses reported that when Premier Alden McLaughlin announced at the last Chamber of Commerce luncheon, “The government has considered the matter carefully and has agreed on the merits of building a cruise port and enhanced cargo port and to allow the project to proceed to the next stage.”, it “outraged the homegrown actress along with hundreds of others”.

The piece missing from that report is that it ALSO PLEASED HUNDREDS OF OTHERS.

And just for the record although Grace Gealey was raised from infancy (at year 2) in the Cayman Islands she was born in Butler, Pennsylvania to an American father and an Afro-Caribbean mother. Cayman was her mother’s native home. Both her parents had hearing disabilities.

She has done incredibly well and I admire her talents. I am not blaming her for these opinions. But, they are just that and they are not worth the time, the attention and the media hoopla.

And that is my last word on Gealey and her crusade against the cruise berthing facility. And this is the first and only publicity her views on it will be given by me.

For all the above reasons.