This has been a very interesting debate and I’ve learned quite a lot from the speeches that have been made on all sides of this Chamber. I’m very pleased, on behalf of my party, to support the Plaid Cymru motion today.

I was very pleased to hear the note of optimism that Dai Lloyd struck a moment ago and the point he made about the connection between Welsh and the Basque language and Hebrew and the way the situation has been turned around in those two other cases. It gives us a great deal of hope for Wales as well. We’ve certainly come a long way from ‘Brad y Llyfrau Gleision’, when it was the policy of the Government of the day to try and wipe the language out. Today, fortunately, we have a completely different attitude.

I’m surprised, actually, that the Government has sought to amend this motion in the way that it has because there is a consensus around the house that we should support the aims of the Welsh Government. I think it is a noble endeavour that they’ve engaged in to have this aspiration for 1 million Welsh speakers by 2050, and I think we should acknowledge that the Welsh Government has made a huge contribution towards turning the language situation around. I think, in the form of the current Minister, as I’ve said before, there is nobody better suited to drive this measure through. So, I don’t think the Government needs to be defensive in any way and I don’t see point 2 in this motion as being critical of the Government. I think Plaid Cymru probably deliberately decided not to introduce a note of confrontation into this debate in order to encourage the consensus that we all need to show towards the outside world. If it hadn’t been for the Government wanting to delete that pure statement of fact in point 2, then we could all engage in this debate on a note of complete agreement. So, it’s regrettable therefore that this debating point type of approach has been adopted. But I think we’re all agreed on what we want to achieve and so there’s no disagreement there.

I think what Llyr Gruffydd said in his opening speech today was right. We all acknowledge the enormity of the task to achieve 1 million Welsh speakers by 2050. It may be more of an aspiration than a reality, in a sense, but I think if we can make significant strides towards achieving that, then that in itself would be well worth doing. It does require the change of attitude that he described, about promoting the use of Welsh. I think we all have, as individuals, to do our bit in that respect. I’m struggling my way through the learning books at the minute because I didn’t have the great advantage of Dai Lloyd and others of growing up in a Welsh-speaking household—neither of my parents spoke Welsh. We lived in Monmouthshire, which was monoglot English at that time, until I was 11 years old, then moved to Carmarthenshire. I was 11 before I had any instruction in Welsh at all. Two years later, I had to choose between Welsh and German and I opted for German. So, in the course of my school career, I learnt French and German and Russian, and I did German and Russian at university as well, but unfortunately I didn’t take the opportunity to use Welsh when I had it. But I’m pleased to say—