Ernest DeCouto

Ernest D. DeCouto CBE (1926–2017) was a politician from Bermuda. He served as Speaker of the House of Assembly of Bermuda from 1993 to 1998.

Early life

DeCouto was of Portuguese descent. He was educated at the Whitney Institute, Gilbert Institute, Warwick Academy, and Bermuda Commercial School. He joined the Department of Agriculture in 1943, and later worked for Master's Ltd., Colonial Airlines, Eastern Air Lines, and Rego Ltd., a real estate firm. In 1960, DeCouto established his own real estate company, DeCouto and Dunstan Real Estate. He served as president until his retirement in 1992.[1]

Politics

After serving on the Smith's Parish council, DeCouto was elected to the House of Assembly at the 1972 general election, winning the Smith's North constituency for the United Bermuda Party (UBP). He was appointed Minister of Youth and Sport in 1981, under Premier David Gibbons. DeCouto was elected Deputy Speaker in 1989 and Speaker in 1993, the first such officeholder of Portuguese descent. He retired from politics in 1998. According to John Barritt, DeCouto "had a very good grasp of the rules of parliamentary procedure and prided himself on keeping abreast of rulings and interpretations throughout the Caribbean, in particular, and the Commonwealth generally". Michael Dunkley said "as a Speaker he was first class — he ran a very good House [...] he ran a very direct debate and was extremely fair".[1]

gollark: Oh, and if you look at versions where it's "pull lever to divert trolley onto different people" versus "push person off bridge to stop trolley", people tend to be less willing to sacrifice one to save five in the second case, because they're more involved and/or it's less abstract somehow.
gollark: There might be studies on *that*, actually, you might be able to do it without particularly horrible ethical problems.
gollark: You don't know that. We can't really test this. Even people who support utilitarian philosophy abstractly might not want to pull the lever in a real visceral trolley problem.
gollark: Almost certainly mostly environment, yes.
gollark: It's easy to say that if you are just vaguely considering that, running it through the relatively unhurried processes of philosophizing™, that sort of thing. But probably less so if it's actually being turned over to emotion and such, because broadly speaking people reaaaallly don't want to die.

See also

References
  1. Simon Jones (16 December 2017). "Ernest DeCouto (1926–2017)". The Royal Gazette. Retrieved 13 November 2018.


This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.