JUST WHEN we need solidarity we find a numbing insularity.

Exactly at the point one public organisation needs the pushy support of others, we see yawning indifference.

The struggle to save Natural Resources Wales visitor centres at Ynyslas, Bwlch Nant yr Arian and Coed y Brenin is not one that NRW should be abandoned to wage alone.

These centres are extremely important as little beacons of enlightenment that help to celebrate and protect nature. Particularly at the moment, when the biodiversity crisis is dramatically worsening in the face of a sudden and major disappearance of a range of insects vital for a functioning ecosystem.

They’re also a crucial cog in the tourism industry, one of Wales’s biggest earners.

Yet Ceredigion and Gwynedd councils, which share a heavy responsibility for the economic prosperity of the region, signal indifference to the imminent shutdown of these hubs of touristic activity. The councils are duty-bound to do their utmost to see that these centres survive. Instead, they are abdicating that responsibility.

It’s not as if their support would necessarily need to be financial, though that would obviously be enormously helpful. It could almost as well come in the form of influence and pressure on the new Welsh government to step in, as this newspaper demanded last week.

Indifference is not limited to local government. As the Cambrian News has pointed out, its offer to facilitate a task force to try to save the visitor centres was addressed also to Senedd members, Aberystwyth University and tourism bodies.

Not a single word has been heard from any of them, or from the councils. They all need to wake up and start caring - urgently. 

SOUND the trumpets. Ring the bells. Put out more flags. 

We’ve got a new first minister. 

But not just any old premier. Eluned Morgan, Senedd member for Mid and West Wales and Welsh Labour leader, is also a peer of the realm. Baroness Morgan of Ely no less. I tell you, some countries have all the luck.

So it’s hardly surprising that everything’s going to be wonderful. She herself has said so, in her inaugural speech to the Senedd. 

She assures us: “I hope to be defined by my unwavering commitment to the people of Wales, by my years of public service and my determination to create a fairer, greener and more prosperous nation for us all, a leader focused on delivery and on ambition for our nation, a leader driven by a sense of service and respect for the people I serve.

“Under my leadership”, she tells the Senedd, “our focus will be firmly on…listening to what people want and delivering in every corner of this great nation.

“…I promise to champion voices and experiences that have too often been sidelined and silenced, to champion parts of Wales that too often feel like they’re on the periphery, like my home in St Davids in west Wales.”

All this was rather odd. It was like the victory speech of a Labour leader who has just toppled the latest in a succession of awful Tory governments and is whooping it up at the prospect of how everything is now going to change, to be different and unutterably better.

The reality is that she is the sixth first minister since the initial National Assembly election in 1999 and all, of course, have been Labour. 

Consequently, despite warm words in her speech for her predecessors, is Eluned Morgan actually hinting that she thinks Alun Michael, Rhodri Morgan, Carwyn Jones, Mark Drakeford and Vaughan Gething were all in one way or another lacking, that their records on fairness, the environment and prosperity are less than sparkling? That they weren’t driven by ambition for the nation and a sense of service?

That they failed to stick up for the sidelined and the silenced, or to champion parts of Wales that too often feel they are, as she puts it, “on the periphery”?

As a minister holding various portfolios in Senedd governments since 2017, are her words to some degree a criticism of her own record?

The one thing she doesn’t mention is health. But then, why let what was presumably intended as a celebratory oration be mucked up by relating a chronicle heavy on a poorly performing health service during her three years-plus as health and social services minister?

Why indeed mention her persistent refusal to contemplate for north Ceredigion and southern Gwynedd one of the innovative rapid diagnosis centres (RDCs) for patients suspected of having cancer?

(These are supposed to be within easy reach of everyone in Wales, but Morgan the health minister claimed, entirely spuriously, that people on this rural “periphery” didn’t mind making a 150-mile-plus round-trip by road to their nearest RDC in Llanelli.) 

Why bother to admit that some cancer care treatment in Wales lags decades behind other countries when it comes to survival rates? 

That, under Alun Michael and Rhodri Morgan, Labour administrations for years failed to provide a single consultant cardiologist for Bronglais Hospital, despite repeated promises that they would?

That a former chief executive of Hywel Dda health board was allowed to summarily axe, for no good reason, an entire floor of a planned extension to Bronglais Hospital? 

If Eluned Morgan really wants to reach out to people she needs to show that her positivity amounts to something.

That her words are more than empty rhetoric, heroic froth useful for pumping up Labour SMs all agog in the Senedd chamber. 

That her government, unlike every other Welsh Labour administration since 1999, will cease to be damagingly South Wales-centric, and ensure by its actions that people in other parts of the country will never again feel themselves “on the periphery”. 

Achieving that would be a minor miracle. Because it would necessitate nothing less than a turning inside-out of the consciousness of the Cardiff political class, who have never, ever, with either enthusiasm or success, embraced rural Wales as an entity worthy of its attention and affection.

The result, for people living north of the M4 corridor, has been more or less institutionalised neglect.

If Eluned Morgan ever manages to change that, she will have really distinguished herself.