The highly anticipated Budget presentation of Prime Minister Andrew Holness was interrupted by a malfunctioning audio system in Parliament on Thursday afternoon.
About 15 minutes into his presentation, the microphone went dead and those outside Gordon House, including persons watching on the Government-operated Public Broadcasting Corporation (PBCJ) and those connected via the internet, were unable to hear Holness.
A seeming fix of the problem lasted less than one minute before the system went dead again.
At that stage, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Marisa Dalrymple-Philibert, asked for a five-minute adjournment, but that time passed and extended to more like an hour before the actual resumption of the presentation, with continued signs that the technical problem was not entirely resolved..
On the motion to adjourn the sitting for five minutes, the Member of Parliament (MP) for St Catherine South West, Everald Warmington, could be head saying “this is sabotage”.
But Holness is now back in stride, light-heartedly indicating on resumption that the microphone, unfortunately, went dead as “I was about to drop some licks on the Opposition”.
