Chances are you’ve probably packed away your daffodil or leek for another year, and the kids’ “Welsh costumes” are back on top of the wardrobe.

Nevertheless, now seems a good time to have a proper conversation about Dydd Gwyl Dewi – St David’s Day. I think most of us would agree that we should make much more of our patron saint, both for our own national consciousness and to promote Cymru on the world stage. Establishing March 1 as a national bank holiday is the first step.

It’s extremely rare for all the political parties to agree on anything, but a St David’s Day bank holiday is one of those. It is quite remarkable that Labour, Conservatives, Plaid Cymru and the Liberal Democrats (and I assume Reform UK, if their specific policies were more readily accessible) have manifesto commitments for St David’s Day to become an official bank holiday in Wales. This is a rare example of a policy that has consensus across the political divide, but one that is still no nearer to being enacted.

There’ve been unanimous Senedd votes and plenty of petitions too.

By the way, if you want to read something that will leave you somewhere between laughter and tears, take a look at the UK Government’s response to a 2022 petition which had 13,000 signatures. The lines that “the current pattern of bank holidays is well-established and accepted” and that “the decisions to create bank holidays for St Andrew’s Day and St Patrick’s Day have been developed against a backdrop of different histories, economic, social, cultural and legal systems” say it all. My translation of these is “b*gger off, you should know your place. The other nations have their bank holidays but they got in before you had any political voice. We hold the power over deciding this, so crawl back under your rock...”

We might only have had a democratically elected Senedd for a quarter of a century, but I don’t need to tell you that Wales is an ancient nation with a proud history, a distinctive culture and sporting heritage, and a language of its own.

I guess there is an argument that says we shouldn’t revere yet another man while women’s history in Wales is so blatantly ignored. But I think I’d make an exception for Dewi Sant as long as we continue to make up for lost time with Monumental Welsh Women’s campaign for more statues of amazing women from history. This is not an either/or, after all.

Dewi Sant is the only native-born patron saint in Ireland and Britain. He........

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