One piece of legislation will not be enough to solve the issue of crimes surrounding Easter bonfires, known as lambradjies, and other explosives, which were reported around Cyprus over the Easter period, Larnaca mayor Andreas Vyras said on Friday.

“This is a very serious issue. What we need to clarify is that even the title of ‘lambradjia’ is a bit misleading. What has been happening even from January until Easter Saturday, all the phenomena associated with this, really has nothing to do with the custom of the lambradjia,” he told the Cyprus News Agency.

He then turned his attention to the matter of the bill the government had attempted to pass through parliament the week before Easter, but that the House legal committee rejected on the grounds that it was “was not commonly accepted by stakeholders”.

“We must clarify that even if the bill were to pass, in my opinion, if a series of very many other things are not done, it will not change anything. The bill referred to some lambradjies which are currently being lit without any particular problems, so while the issue is very serious, it cannot be solved with just one bill if we do not want the same phenomena to repeat themselves,” Vyras said.

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He added that from now on, all stakeholders, including the police, the fire brigade, and municipalities, “must sit down to see if additional legislative regulations are needed”.

Meanwhile, Livadia deputy mayor Marios Armenis described the incidents which occurred in his borough over the Easter weekend as “tragic”.

Youths threw rocks and firecrackers at members of the public and then at the police over Easter Saturday night, with the police saying afterwards that they are examining video footage taken in the area with the aim of identifying those involved.

“The situation was tragic, there was damage to the nursery school, to the adjacent supermarket, to a building materials store, to bins, they burnt our trees. As I said, the situation was unacceptable,” he told the Cyprus News Agency.

“We ask the state, the police, to do everything possible to find the culprits … who were launching firecrackers indiscriminately and endangering the public, passersby, and police officers.”

Despite this, he was keen to stress that those who committed crimes over the Easter weekend are a minority.

“Those who did what they did are a small minority of young people. The vast majority of our young people were in churches to celebrate the resurrection of the Lord. I call on the families of these young people to reflect on the behaviour of their children and to take measures as quickly as possible before it is too late to change this behaviour,” he said.

The government had made a last-ditch attempt on April 9 to get a bill regulating lambradjies through the House legal committee ahead of the final parliamentary plenary session before Easter took place on April 10, but the committee failed to acquiesce at the time.

Some quarters reportedly pointed the finger at the committee after the various acts of delinquency which were seen over the weekend, but the committee has insisted that the bill put forward by the government was not ready to be passed into law.

The committee argued that the bill “was not commonly accepted by stakeholders”, and thus “essentially shifted the burden of responsibility to the legislature to decide on its most crucial point”.

This “most crucial point”, it added, was the matter of when the bill would be implemented, with the government hoping that the bill would be passed on April 10 and then implemented with immediate effect.

However, local authorities, which, if the bill had passed, would have been tasked with vetting and approving applications to light lambradjies, had asked that the bill take effect from next year to allow themselves and the public to be adequately informed and ensure “no confusion” over the matter.

In light of this, the committee said on Tuesday, “it was absolutely impossible for [the bill] to be implemented for this Easter, which was only one week after the session in question”.