Diolch, Lywydd. Thank you for this opportunity to speak about and celebrate the Neath abbey ironworks, and thank you for this innovation in the Chamber.

The ironworks today are a dilapidated site, but as with many industrial sites in Wales, they were once a place of great innovation, of the earliest copper smelting and, latterly, the founding of ironworks that were strategically vital to the Welsh economy. Its export was exported to India, and it was a major place of employment for the people of Neath and beyond. In its heyday of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it saw Neath being a globally connected town.

We are indebted to the friends of the ironworks for keeping an awareness alive of the site, and recently to a public lecture in the town by Professor Huw Bowen of Swansea University, which charted a reclaimed future for the site as a place of exploration and of enterprise, where our heritage can be a guide to our future. The spirit of innovation embodied in the ironworks should not stay in our history. A place that exported the earliest steam engines around Europe should awaken the imagination of schoolchildren and help us all lift our sights as we build the future economy of our country. So, our task is to turn the example of this jewel of our Welsh economic heritage into inspiration for a new generation of innovators in a modern Neath and a modern Wales.