Ireland has embraced a new political and social maturity, the President, Mrs McAleese, told a meeting last night, writes Patsy McGarry.
"This will be seen as a time when people gathered together the bitter wisdom distilled from their historical memory, grew sickened of the corrosive vanities and the waste of life and decided consciously to change direction," she said.
"Deeply embedded in that decision was and is an acknowledgment that only with self-sacrifice and compromise can there be a more humanly decent future. This generation decided not to be driven by history but to become its driver," she said.
Mrs McAleese was speaking in Dublin's Shelbourne Hotel on "The Religious Sense" at a meeting organised by the international Catholic movement, Communion and Liberation.