Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness has pushed back against mounting criticism over more than $1 billion in hurricane donations that remained largely unspent months after Hurricane Melissa, accusing critics of promoting what he described as “common nonsense” while ignoring the broader scale of the Government’s recovery effort.

“Sometimes you have things that are common sense and sometimes you have things that are common nonsense,” he said on Monday at the Lewis Town Early Childhood Institution in St Elizabeth, as one of two Labour Day national projects unfolded.

A real-time audit by the Auditor General's Department had found that only $26.2 million of the $1.44 billion in cash donations in the wake of the Category 5 hurricane had been spent up to April. The report also noted that funds donated after Hurricane Beryl in July 2024 also remained unspent.