And thank you very much to my friend and colleague Mike Hedges for tabling this debate. Where else in the world would we have a debate like this? Well, perhaps in Chubut state assembly. It's lovely, isn't it? It's quintessentially Welsh to have this kind of debate on the chapels of Wales. Mike Hedges and myself might be Members of different political parties, but we have a great deal in common, and one of those things is that we're both members of the Baptist Union of Wales. I welcome you to cheer that point.

One name given to chapels in the past was 'tŷ cwrdd', which literally means meeting house—that's where the community came together. And without being too sentimental about it, very often, it was the few pennies saved by the people that built our chapels, from Salem Rhydcymerau in the constituency of my friend Mabon ap Gwynfor, which was immortalised by Curnow Vosper and Endaf Emlyn, to Morriston's Tabernacle, the cathedral of Welsh non-conformity, as Mike Hedges often reminds us.

The truth about our nation’s chapels is the wonderful poem by Williams Parry about the hall in Mynytho:

'It is built of poverty;—not stones / but love is its masonry; / shared aspirations are its timber; and shared commitment is what raised it up.'

As a carpenter in the Rhondda—Buffy Williams—in the final decades of the nineteenth century, my great grandfather worked on a number of chapels, including his own chapel, namely Noddfa Treorchy. This chapel held over 1,500 people—more even than Morriston's Tabernacle, Mike—and during a visit in the late 1970s Penri Jones, the author of Jabas and the editor of Lol, said this about Noddfa Treorchy: 'The chapel is as a sporting arena and the pulpit as a stage.' Visiting the vestry, he said that there were better facilities in that vestry than in many modern schools. It was here that the composer John Hughes played the organ. And it was the first meeting place of the world-famous Treorchy male voice choir.

But, for a number of reasons—be they social, political and economic—the congregation at Noddfa, like many other chapels, declined. Penri Jones ends his visit by saying: 'There was once joy here, but there must have been some catastrophic neglect to cause it all to disappear with such finality.' The prophet's words came true, because within a few years, within five years, indeed, Noddfa was burnt to the ground. It all disappeared in such a final way, as Penri Jones foresaw, all of the resources, the community and musical resource, had gone.

Huw T. Edwards, the Labour trade unionist who was described as Wales's unofficial Prime Minister, said,