Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:10 pm on 20 March 2018.
The Member has always been a fount of original ideas, and that's one of them. It's an idea, I think, that's worthy of further examination. What I wouldn't want to do, of course, is to suggest to people that if they want to claim Welsh heritage, they've got to pay for it. But what is important is that we work with the diaspora that we have.
Just to give you an example of how far we've come, back in 2011 we had very few offices abroad. We've opened many more since then. We had no real link with the diaspora in the US, we had no link with Washington; now we host an event on Capitol Hill every single year. That is an event that's attended by many politicians on Capitol Hill. We always host events in New York; there's a new Welsh society in New York made up of young entrepreneurs of Welsh heritage—many of them from Wales originally, anyway—who want to help us, and, of course, we've just opened a new office in Montreal. Montreal is the home of some major companies that employ people in Wales, and we know that we have a diaspora in Montreal as well.
What we have done since 2011 is to look at opening new offices in parts of the world where we know that the Welsh heritage is strong in order to utilise the diaspora that exists there, and work with them to promote Wales in their home countries and, of course, make sure that we're able to open up opportunities for Welsh businesses as they look to trade with the US and Canada.