 Good afternoon everybody and you're most welcome to this session with the First Minister of Wales, Mark Drakeford. I want to thank the Welsh Government Office in Dublin and particularly Catherine Hallett for their help in putting this meeting together. It couldn't have been done without them. And before I introduce the First Minister, I'd just like to say that he would speak for about 20 minutes. If you have questions to ask, you can use the facilities on resume, which you can see on your screen. And you can be free to send your questions throughout the session as they accord to you. And then I will go into them as soon as the First Minister has finished his speech. Let me remind you that today's presentation and both the presentation and the question and answers are on the record. I think this meeting is taking place at a very useful time because on St David's Day earlier this year, the Irish and Welsh Governments agreed a new shared statement and a joint action plan for the period from 2021 to 2025. And I'm really looking forward to hearing the First Minister tell us what he has in mind about putting flesh on the bones of this joint action plan, which is an important event. I also want to say how pleased I am to see that the Irish Consulate in Cardiff has been reopened. Regrettably, it was closed some time after I left London where I had the pleasure to be the Irish ambassador in London. Mark Drayford, who has an academic record, he became a member of the assembly in Cardiff for the first time in 2011, and he became First Minister in 2018. And those of us who watch British television and I'm sure many of us watch British television will have noticed how steady his hand was and how good his communication skills during the COVID crisis. In an article recently in The Guardian, and I quote, it would say that quote, there is a strong argument that the British politician whose reputation has been most enhanced by the challenges of the last 18 months is Mark Drayford. It is a very great pleasure for me to invite the First Minister of Wales, Mark Drayford, to address us. Floor is yours, First Minister. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed for that very kind introduction and for the opportunity to be with you in this webinar today. Very grateful indeed to the IEA for the invitation and to those who have helped to make all this happen. Now you said quite rightly that I've been a member of the Senate here since 2011, but one way or another I have knocked about in devolution here in Wales since the very beginning of it. I was a very good friend far before devolution with Rodri Morgan, the first First Minister of Wales and came to head up his political office when he became First Minister. Rodri was the most tremendous enthusiast for Welsh-Irish relations. He could have named every fullback and probably every other position as well that had plagued in any Welsh-Irish rugby match in the last half century. And I remember very clearly that in the very early days of devolution he came to Dublin to take part in an event like this with the IEA in your office, your premises in Dublin, and it would be great to have been with you today. Now Rodri was there in the spring of 20 of the year 2000, so devolution was less than a year old and he was there in a way to celebrate one of the key arguments that persuaded people in Wales to vote for devolution in the referendum of 1997 because unlike Scotland, there hadn't been a long cross-party, cross-society campaign for devolution and one of the few arguments that united people across all of those sort of perspectives was the slogan that devolution would give Wales a stronger voice in Europe. It was a really powerful theme in the foundation of devolution and Rodri's visit across to Ireland was a demonstration of the fact that from the earliest earrings of Welsh government we were very keen to make a reality of that promise. Well, a generation later we clearly find ourselves in very dramatically changed circumstances outside the European Union coping and aiming to recover from the pandemic which remains a dominant factor in Welsh life today. Working inside a divided and very often fractious United Kingdom and with an uncertain future in front of us confronted as we all are across internal and external boundaries by the other huge crisis of our time, the challenge of climate change. So I'm going to focus, Chair, on three issues. They're related issues but I'll take them sequentially. I'm going to say something about the ongoing impact of Brexit here in Wales and in terms of Wales's relationships with other parts of Europe. I'm going to focus in the middle of what I have to say by Welsh-Irish relations and particularly the statement that we agreed to gather and publish back on the first of March this year. And I'll end by saying something about the state of the United Kingdom itself. They say these things are intertwined with one another but I'll take them in that order and then make a few final something up suggestions. So I should begin as I always do by saying that the Welsh Government campaign to remain in the European Union believe the world's future was best secured by continuing membership. We failed to persuade a sufficient number of our fellow citizens in Wales of that proposition and much as we might to regret that our focus once the referendum was held was not on the fact of Brexit because that was decided in a referendum, but on the form of Brexit. And our main disagreements with successive UK governments ever since June 2016 has been on the way in which they went about negotiating the leaving of the European Union and the future relationship that we could have. We argued for a very different economic relationship one in which we would have stayed in the signal market would have stayed in the customs union and then would have negotiated a different set of political arrangements between the UK and the continuing members of the European Union different and better deals were available and our biggest regret is that we failed to persuade the UK government to take some. Now today, it seems to me that the air is pretty thick with the sound of Brexit chickens coming home to roost. One of the things they'll return to more towards the end is the way in which Brexit has deepened fissures that were here inside the UK and exacerbated nationalisms, including nationalism here in Wales, which were there before Brexit but have been given new prominence and a new sort of fuel and attack from the Brexit experience. In practical terms in economic terms we see every day, the price that we are paying from the trade and cooperation agreement. As we predicted from the very start, we have seen the end within a matter of weeks of the seafood industry that had been painfully but enthusiastically grown in the north of Wales, particularly often using European Union funding to promote that growth. It was a thriving industry by the time we left the European Union, 90% of its projects were exported to the southern parts of the European Union and within five weeks that industry was over. It's one gallant attempt to send products from Wales to the south of France just ended in complete failure. By the time the goods arrived there, with the many hold-ups that were now in its path, they were simply unsaleable and that industry just does not exist today in the way that it did only a very short period ago. In Holly Head, in Fishtad, in Pembroke Dock, I've seen a substantial fall in trade flows and a corresponding drop in economic activity, where Welsh supermarkets have empty shelves. It is because we do not have hauliers, we do not have HGV drivers to carry on what previously was straightforward commercial activity. Today hauliers in both directions inconvenienced by red tape where before there was none. The cost of doing business rising significantly. Products which passed freely across or maritime border for decades now subject to costly delays and checks. And we haven't seen, we haven't seen yet the real impact because they are further delayed, take back control the UK government said of all borders and yet just the last few days has had to announce a further extension to the point in which goods can be entered. The future of the UK will be subject to those checks. So, in so many aspects of our lives, we have seen the direct impact of a Brexit deal that was struck. And from a Welsh government perspective, those impacts have been damaging to our economy and have created new barriers to many of those things that we have built up together over so many years. Now for us, that means in the Welsh government that we know that we have to work harder. We have to be outward looking. We have to put more effort into explaining to people elsewhere that Wales remains a welcoming place connected to the rest of the world wanting to make sure that we go on having strong bilateral relationships with key regional governments elsewhere in the world. We often have, you know, a Celtic and linguistic component to them links with Brittany, links with a Basque country, and of course, with a member state level with the Republic of Ireland. Those bilateral relationships, I think, are all the more important when we no longer have the argue in those relationships of membership of the European Union created for us. There are those opportunities to meet, those chances to discuss that occur naturally by our joint participation in European Union forums. Now we have to do more to recreate them in other ways and to give them a new form of substance. As you said, Chet, in opening nowhere, has that been more important for us than in reaffirming our relationships with Ireland? We have, thank goodness, very glad indeed to have the re-opened consulate here in Cardiff. And as you said, we have a reciprocal arrangement with a Welsh government office in Dublin. And the Chet statement and action plan that Minister Simon Coveney and I were able to sign on St David's Day codifies a set of areas in which we are committed to go on working even more closely together over the year ahead. There are six teams in the cooperation agreement, political and official engagement, climate and sustainability, trade and tourism, education and research, cultural language and heritage, communities, diaspora and sport. I'm not going to cover all of those in the time that we have today that we just pick out maybe three or four of them. On deepening political engagement, the agreement commits us to an annual meeting, a face to face meeting between ministers in the Irish government and ministers in the Welsh government. The first of these will happen later this autumn when a group of Irish ministers will come to Wales. We are working really hard to make the very most we can of that opportunity to get that whole political engagement process off to the best possible. We will start looking forward hugely to welcoming the delegation here to Cardiff to make sure that there are opportunities for bilateral meetings with ministers with other groups, academic institutions, third sector organizations around the other themes in the agreement. Climate change, as I said, it's a huge challenge of our time and we share that enormously important natural resource, the Irish Sea, and we have already, through the work that we have done over 20 years between our universities, a set of investments in making sure that we have the best understanding of that natural resource that our shipping and our fishing in the sea is done in a sustainable way. And that we find new ways to draw on that asset in the creation of new renewable energy sources for the future. Marine energy is enormously important to the future of Wales and to the future of Ireland as well. And there are a whole series of practical ways in which we're taking that forward together. The Celtic Sea Alliance, a partnership between Wales, Ireland, Cornwall and the Isles of Silly. The simply blue energy development, joint initiatives, Welsh companies, Irish companies developing floating wind and other marine energy possibilities between us. The first giga, what the floating energy, the Celtic Sea, could provide over 3000 jobs, jobs on both sides of the Irish Sea and nearly 700 million pounds in supply chain opportunities in less than a decade, in less than 10 years ahead. It is just an enormously important resource and the agreement commits us to doing more together on it. And when Irish ministers are here in Wales, one of the things we will want to focus on is making sure that we are working together in the best possible way to get the most out of those opportunities. As I said, that will build on the research capacity that we have developed through the Wales, Ireland, European territorial cooperation program. And it's one of our deep regrets that the UK government was not prepared to go on investing into territorial cooperation programs, not just between Wales and Ireland, but other cooperation programs as well. We're not going to throw away the 20 years of investment that we've laid down and part of the agreement we've struck will give new opportunities to make sure that the research component in marine, in energy and other parts of the marine agenda are taken forward together. I chatted so many other aspects of the agreement. Let me maybe just focus on one. One of the other huge regrets that we had about the Brexit, the way in which we negotiated Brexit was that the UK government failed to secure a future for Welsh young people in the Erasmus Plus program. Erasmus was a program invented and developed by the most senior Welsh civil servant in the European Union. How will Kerry Johnson, many of you will know. To find the young people in Wales no longer have access to everything that comes with Erasmus Plus is a matter of huge regret, an act of cultural vandalism by the First Minister of Scotland. We have been not at all satisfied with the alternative arrangements that the UK government has put in place. So we have found from our own resources a very significant sum of money to develop our own scheme for young people in Wales. And people of course in our higher education institutions but in further education in our youth service as well. And I just want to say a huge thanks to the Irish government for the warmth of their willingness to make sure that there are opportunities for young people from Ireland and from Wales to continue to travel, to work, to study, to volunteer here in Wales for young people from Ireland and in Ireland for young people from Wales. You know we have Irish language courses in our universities in Cardiff and in Aberystwyth where young people study our common heritage and Celtic languages and our new program. Which is part of the agreement that we signed on St David's Day is just one more example there are many more of how that agreement will further cement the relationships between us. Shall I say something briefly about how all of this plays into relations within the United Kingdom itself. As a unionist to the extent that I believe that Wales's future is best secured by entrenched devolution where decisions that apply only in Wales are made only by people in Wales, but where we choose to pool our sovereignty with other parts of the United Kingdom for common purposes. Common purposes in defence in foreign affairs in dealing with climate change as well. But I do think that the union is under threat in a way that it has never been in my political lifetime. David Lidington which is May's deputy prime minister said in a speech in Cambridge in May that he thought the United Kingdom was under greater threat than at any time that he could remember and he reminded his audience that there is nothing inevitable about the United Kingdom staying together. For the United Kingdom to stay together those of us who believe in its future have to create a compelling vision for people to make it something that people want to continue to be membership of that they remain in membership not because they are brown into it or scared into it. But because it offers them a future that they wanted to sign up to. But you can't do that through the course of action that the current UK government has adopted a sort of muscular unionism where bigger flags, more choruses of root Britannia, larger buildings with the UK logo on the front of them in other parts of the United Kingdom. So whatever that will work in fact what it does is it strengthens the determination of those people who believe that a different future future of separation would be preferable. The United Nations have to be like that a well functioning union based on a fair distribution of resources and respect for each of the four constituent nations of a voluntary union seems to me to give us the basis in which we can continue to work together. The United Kingdom as a powerful engine of redistribution and an engine for working together on those challenges that don't stop at any border of which climate change, the degradation in a natural environment and loss of biodiversity. All of those seem to me to be really powerful reasons for why work citizens would choose to be part of the sort of union that we have outlined in the Welsh government's recent republication of our strengthening reforming the union document. Let me end by also pointing to some of the other intergovernmental mechanisms that I think can help to deal with a number of dilemmas we face of which the British Irish come so I think is in our experience the outstandingly the most important one to meet in Cardiff in November this year. It is a place where the word British is not a sort of monocultural expression of the UK government's idea of what to be British might be. It is a prism where the eye of man and the government of Guernsey of Scotland of Wales and Jersey, as well as of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland come together to share common views block took express views on topics of common interest. I think the British Irish council could be strengthened. I think it could do more. It could help to submit relationships between its component parts and in an era where as I said those other ways of coming into contact with one another have diminished. Then I think its significance as a forum increases its relationship with parliamentary forums that bring the different parliaments across the United Kingdom and the island of Ireland together is another way in which I think that forum is right for development and strengthening. And if we do that then we do have a feature in which those common challenges can be addressed can be addressed in a way that gives off different people's confidence that by working together. We achieve more on their behalf than we can when we regard each other with suspicion or as enemies to be outmaneuvered. That is absolutely not the way in which the Welsh government sees our future. And in reinforcing our position as an outgoing looking welcoming country determined to play our part small as it sometimes might be in working with others. No relationship is more important to us than the one that we have with Ireland. Thank you very much indeed.