Rhodri Morgan: This festival exemplifies the Welsh at their best

We have seen communities grow in Wales - in many cases from nothing at all a hundred and fifty years ago - to become significant centres of population. In a blaze of industrialisation during the 19th century, a large and heterogeneous working class was forced, out of its own resources (intellectual, physical and financial), to create a society in which communal effort was the basis for individual success.

The great institutions of our society - the chapel, the rugby club and the choir, as well as the union and a municipal health service - were based around an ethic of participation, the recognition that in order to receive the benefits of society, then we have to participate in the creation of those benefits in the first place.

The eisteddfod tradition itself is an excellent example of the point I am trying to make. Of course, competition is very important here. But it rests on the strongest possible foundations of co-operative effort. Nothing would be possible here without the huge efforts that local communities invest each year in making the eisteddfod a reality. Nothing would be possible without that network of local events in which participants try out their trades before making their way to the peak of a llwyfan performance. Nothing would be possible, in so many of the performances themselves, without the co-operation that finds its shape in a choir, or a recitation group or the intricacies of a traditional Welsh dance. The knowledge that individuals achieve far more for themselves when working one for another is deeply ingrained in the Welsh psyche.

In a practical sense, we have to reinvent this tradition in the social justice field. Co-operation before competition is a characteristic that is as important to us today as it ever was in Wales.