11. Plaid Cymru Debate: Coverage of the Six Nations

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 6:01 pm on 11 March 2020.

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Photo of Lord Dafydd Elis-Thomas Lord Dafydd Elis-Thomas Independent 6:01, 11 March 2020

(Translated)

Thank you very much, Deputy Presiding Officer. I’m pleased to confirm that we as a Government will be supporting this motion, and I therefore expect the support to be unanimous, as all contributions have been.

You will recall that we had a topical question and I responded to that as robustly as I could last week. I won’t rehearse anything that I said last week, but I do want to inform you of what I’ve been doing in the meantime, namely that I have written to the UK Government, not only to convey the feelings and views of this Chamber, but I’ve also sent a digital version of our Record of Proceedings so that the Secretary of State can read something from a Parliament that is worth reading—this Parliament as opposed to the Parliament that he’s a Member of, perhaps. And I’ve also sent a copy to my colleague, Gareth Davies, the chair of the Welsh Rugby Union. I haven’t yet received responses.

But the fact that we, once again today, for the second week on the trot, are discussing this issue—and I am grateful to my colleagues in Plaid Cymru for tabling this motion and I will be doing something similar after this debate to ensure that, once again, the UK Government is aware of the views of this Parliament and that they do consider what should happen in terms of the listing. The fact that we have seen cross-party support from Plaid Cymru, the Conservatives and, of course, from David Rowlands—thank you to you, David, from the Brexit Party—and quite a serious contribution from Andrew R.T. Davies, as well as David Melding from the Conservative side—.

The only word of warning that I would give in agreeing with everything that’s been said in this debate is that this question is not going away. The funding for international rugby, working on a commercial or partly commercial basis, is going to be an issue that we will have to find a solution to, both in Welsh rugby and international rugby, and we who are unhappy about the solution that’s been put forward to date are duty bound to see what kind of solution could be acceptable to us. So, I have one other invitation to make to this Senedd, as I invited the Senedd last week: it would be most useful if one of the committees of this Senedd were willing to consider this issue further, to call for evidence and produce a—