Thank you very much to Plaid for putting forward this debate. I think it's given us an opportunity to discuss some of the more subtle challenges of beating this pandemic.

It seems to me that our arts and culture are so rich in Wales because so many of us care so much about our history, our storytelling and our music. But I want to start by thanking David Stacey, who has chaired the board of the Sherman Theatre for no less than 35 years, and who only stood down last week. He has been an indefatigable champion of the Sherman Theatre's innovative, challenging and award-winning work. The passion with which he has served the organisation since its inception is exemplary. Even though he is standing down from that role, I'm absolutely confident he will continue to hold people to account for promises made that are currently on hold because of the pandemic.

The Sherman's path-breaking work through the Sherman 5 to reach out to communities who do not normally go to the theatre—disabled people, low-income households, ethnic minority communities—is well recognised by the Arts Council of Wales and, I'm sure, the Welsh Government. This has given the Sherman the agility and the imagination to adapt its creative storytelling role, carrying on within the restrictions required to contain the COVID pandemic. The 'Tydfil Tales' is an excellent example of their way of working. Before the pandemic descended, students from Merthyr College had been visiting a local care home to interview residents about their lives as the basis for a new play. When COVID made live performances impossible, they simply adapted their dramatisation of the stories they had gathered into an audio format, so that care home residents have been able to share the 'Tydfil Tales' together. We hope that, in the future, we'll all be able to hear and indeed see the 'Tydfil Tales'. It's typical of how organisations can and must adapt to the current restrictions or risk falling silent forever.

Another amazing organisation in my constituency is Rubicon Dance, whose eclectic mix of dance opportunities for people of every age and ability has not ceased during the restrictions imposed by COVID. Many of you will have seen the quality of their work in the Senedd in better times. So, they initially started by making sure that they contacted people at the time when they normally attended classes in order to reach out and befriend people during lockdown, and now, like Mr Motivator or Joe Wicks, their online dance classes continue to offer exercise and creative expression to their students, and have been particularly enthusiastically received by the shyest students, who no longer feel inhibited to give full expression to their feelings, expressed through dance.

This doesn't mean that these organisations do not face challenges. The roof still leaks at the Sherman, and they no longer have receipts from ticket sales and cafe takings to pay for that. They have relied on an arts council stabilisation fund grant to invest in the IT infrastructure needed to hold their creative team together, and they managed to furlough 70 per cent of their staff through the coronavirus job retention scheme, which, however, comes to an end at the end of this month. They cannot extend their online performances without upgrading their website, for which they have now applied to the Welsh Government's cultural recovery fund.

Rubicon, too, had to suspend its renovation of the Roath library building on Newport Road, which was a community asset transfer from Cardiff Council. The roof leaks there, too, and the boiler is absolutely bust and does not work at all, so it's impossible to reopen it at the moment, but normal fundraising is impossible at the moment and so they've only managed to retain the current level of activity because of the dedication of their creatives and the generosity of some charitable trusts. How long they can go on for without additional funding is something that we all need to worry about.

The people I worry most about are the musicians in our communities, because, for them, the coronavirus restrictions have been particularly onerous. I know that Clwb Ifor Bach did attempt to reopen during the summer, when the lockdown was lifted, and were doing a reasonable business just as a bar in the city centre, on Womanby Street, but, when the 10 o'clock restrictions came, they felt they just had to close because 70 per cent of their takings were after 10 o'clock in the evening. So, now it is hard to know what organisations like Clwb Ifor Bach face, who have been so important in ensuring that we have a vibrant music industry in Cardiff and for developing the musical abilities and success of so many of our bands. So, I fear for the future for some of these organisations, particularly our musicians, and, so far, the support that's been available, particularly for freelancers, is insufficient to retain these people in the industries for which they are so well suited. So, we have very varied challenges and very significant challenges ahead, and we are absolutely not out of the woods.