Former Labour politician selected to chair S4C
The appointment follows a session where Ms Evans was questioned on her priorities if appointed, her previous experience, and her plans to tackle challenges facing S4C.
The session was conducted bilingually, with a translation facility enabling contributions in Welsh.
Ms Evans, who served as Assembly Member for Mid and West Wales from 2000 to 2003, is also a former charity chief executive and non-profit board member.
She has also worked as a broadcast journalist on S4C's current affairs programme Y Byd ar Bedwar.
The committee's report on Ms Evans' appointment, available on its website, states it was "impressed by Delyth Evans' approach and understanding", and that she had demonstrated she was a suitable candidate to chair S4C.
The committee added that it will invite Ms Evans to update them at the end of her first six months in the role on "her progress in embedding a new organisational culture of trust and transparency, driving forward improvements in governance, and securing S4C's long-term funding beyond 2028".
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
South Wales Argus
3 hours ago
- South Wales Argus
Ex-council deputy leader to stand for Welsh Lib Dems
Mike Hamilton has been selected as the party's lead candidate for the Casnewydd Islwyn constituency, which will be contested for the first time in the 2026 Welsh Parliament election. The seat covers the Westminster constituencies of Newport East, Newport West, and Islwyn. Dr Hamilton said: "Wales needs change after 26 years of mismanagement. "We need proper strategic management of the Welsh economy, not endless money wasting on vanity projects. "We need to fix the fundamental problems with the Welsh NHS, where Welsh patients wait much longer than English patients for key operations, despite equivalent per-patient spending. "And we need to ensure that Wales shows moral leadership on Gaza, where war crimes and human rights abuses have been met with a supine response by the UK Labour Government." A former Merchant Navy engineer and archaeologist, Dr Hamilton is well known in Newport for his community work. He previously served as deputy leader of Newport Council. The 2026 election will use a new proportional representation system, electing six members of the Senedd per constituency. This will increase the likelihood of smaller parties gaining seats in the Senedd. The Welsh Liberal Democrats are focusing their campaign on childcare, support for businesses, and investment in social care as part of their vision for improving the Welsh NHS. Nationally, the party secured more than 3.5 million votes at last year's general election, becoming the largest third party in the UK since 1923 with 72 MPs. The party has prioritised tackling sewage pollution, promoting social care reform, and supporting small and medium-sized businesses. It has also criticised the Labour government's handling of NHS waiting lists, opposed rises in national insurance, and called for the reversal of tax breaks for large banks.
South Wales Argus
3 hours ago
- South Wales Argus
Kevin Wilkins to stand for Lib Dems in new Senedd seat
Kevin Wilkins has been selected to head the Welsh Liberal Democrats' list for the Sir Fynwy Torfaen constituency in the 2026 Senedd election. A new seat for the 2026 Welsh Parliament elections, Sir Fynwy Torfaen covers the Westminster constituencies of Monmouthshire and Torfaen. Mr Wilkins, who lives in Abergavenny and recently returned to Wales after 30 years living and working around Cambridge, said: "I am honoured to have been selected as a Liberal Democrat candidate for Sir Fynwy Torfaen. "Monmouthshire and Torfaen contain very different communities all of which face real challenges at the moment. "Our NHS in Wales is really struggling, the economy is stalling and our beautiful local rivers are dying. We need better answers than those offered by Labour and the Tories. "I look forward to campaigning alongside Brendan and my Lib Dem friends and colleagues to offer a fair, green and humane alternative to the failings of decades of Labour and Tory rule." He will be joined on the party list for the constituency by Brendan Roberts, a community councillor and campaigner in Henllys. The 2026 Senedd election will be conducted under a proportional representation system, electing six members of the Senedd per constituency. This increases the likelihood of seats for smaller parties such as the Liberal Democrats. Mr Wilkins has a track record of community campaigning. He has helped to save a library, post office, bus service and an avenue of cherry trees from being cut down. If elected, Mr Wilkins has pledged to prioritise improving the NHS and protecting rivers. The Welsh Liberal Democrats are campaigning on issues including childcare, support for small businesses and investment in social care.
Spectator
5 hours ago
- Spectator
The oppression of Sally Rooney
Almost a decade ago the Irish academic Liam Kennedy published a tremendous book with the title Unhappy the Land: the Most Oppressed People Ever, the Irish? It is a dissection of one of the most curious pathologies in the world: the desire to have been oppressed; a glorying in being repressed. Kennedy, like a few other brave writers (Ruth Dudley Edwards, Malachi O'Doherty, Kevin Myers) has the courage to point to an under-examined seam in Ireland's history. Specifically he takes aim at the mawkishness that exists in contemporary Irish affairs. The desire to be the first victim, perhaps the greatest victim, of all victims, anywhere in the world. You see similar strains of aspiring victimhood in other mini-nationalisms. Over recent years, Scots and Welsh Nats have all sought to join in the victimhood jamboree. Some years ago I heard a Welsh poetess speaking to a very international and diverse audience. She made her opening plea, or boast, by saying that everyone should remember that the Welsh were the 'first victims' of colonisation – a point which can only be responded to by some combination of a yelp and a yawn. But nobody ever beat the Irish in the victimhood Olympics. Whatever era in their history they want to look at, they can always find a narrative of suffering. Sometimes it has some justification, as with the famine of the 1800s. At other times, as with the Easter Rising and the IRA, the story is sugar-coated to turn people's attention away from the fact that Irish history has been dominated by an unusual percentage of vainglorious murderers and aspiring martyrs. As Kennedy writes: 'There is an almost palpable sense of victimhood and exceptionalism in the presentation of the Irish national past, particularly as reconstructed and displayed for political purpose.' Now that the Troubles are largely over, some Irish people seem almost bored by the peace dividend. And so they scour the Earth looking for other beleaguered people with whom they can claim brotherhood and whom they can, in a variety of ways, patronise. In recent years, no group has been a better candidate for adoption by the Irish than the Palestinian people. It can be seen in the proliferation of Palestinian politics in Irish politics and the singling out of the state of Israel for unusual vilification. It can be seen in the Irish government's planned anti-Israel legislation and in its other curious efforts to interpose themselves into the centre of a conflict in which they have absolutely no role. Given that the Irish government in the 1930s and 1940s looked at the Allies and the Nazis and found it impossible to decide which side to come down on, the current Irish decision to draw a simplistic and ill-informed position on the Israel-Palestine conflict is doubly odd, until you realise that it allows a certain type of Irish person the opportunity to be a sort of bigger sibling in suffering to the Palestinians, with the side-offering of a dose of good old Irish anti-Semitism. This week the newspapers led with a story about the Irish writer Sally Rooney. Her novels have gained some popular acclaim, have sold well and been adapted for television. Born in 1991 in County Mayo, she appears to have been well-marinaded in the prejudices of her native land. In 2021 she made headlines when she refused to have her latest book translated into Hebrew. After all, we can't allow those Hebrew-ites to enjoy middle-rate fiction, can we? She has also called for a boycott of all Israeli cultural institutions. I don't believe Rooney has called for a boycott of any other nation at war, but then why would she? In the Guardian and elsewhere she has expounded her low-resolution understanding of a foreign conflict into which she seeks to throw herself gleefully. Recently the group Palestine Action was proscribed by the British government as a terrorist group. Rooney was one of the 'celebrities' who chose to lobby against this decision. She said: 'Palestine Action is not an armed group. It has never been responsible for any fatalities and does not pose any risk to public safety.' Which isn't quite true. The group has claimed responsibility for hundreds of incidents across the UK, many of which have turned violent. Last summer, Palestine Action activists broke into the Bristol HQ of defence technology firm Elbit Systems. Two police officers were struck with a sledgehammer and an employee suffered head injuries. One of the officers was taken to hospital, while his colleagues seized sledgehammers, axes and other weapons. In June, Palestine Action broke into RAF Brize Norton and damaged aircraft. Estimates of the cost of the damage run from £7 million to more than £30 million. One of those allegedly involved, Muhammad Umer Khalid, 22, faces charges relating to criminal damage and the compromising of this country's security. One of the group's heads faces prosecution over a speech he made on 8 October 2023, in which he said that the massacre of Jews in Israel (named by Hamas 'the Al-Aqsa flood'), which was then still going on, should be emulated everywhere. Or as he put it: 'When we hear the resistance, the Al-Aqsa flood, we must turn that flood into a tsunami of the whole world.' Still, Rooney claims that a ban on Palestine Action constitutes an 'alarming curtailment of free speech'. The other day in the Irish Times, Rooney made herself the martyr in all this, writing ominously: 'My books, at least for now, are still published in Britain and are widely available in bookshops and even supermarkets.' In a similarly self-important vein, she declared that she intended to go on supporting Palestine Action in any way she could, including by donating royalties from her books and TV adaptations. Although she seems to hear the jackboots of the Stasi British police at her door, Rooney is of course Irish, and appears to live in Ireland. And so wittingly or otherwise she joins a long list of Irish public figures willing to throw themselves into the middle of a row – any row – so long as it allows them the warm, fuzzy feeling of continuing to be part of the most oppressed people ever.
