The millennium offers an opportunity for a fresh start, the President, Mrs McAleese, said yesterday.
"It marks, in a special way, the division between the old century we have inherited and shaped - a century filled with the toxin of hatred, brutality, narrow-minded bigotry - and the new century about to dawn, still pristine in its freshness and endless possibilities.
"What do we want for that new millennium? What type of society, what type of world? All those empty days stretch out in front of us - days yet to be filled, yet to be lived. We can shape them well or badly as we choose. Do we want our future to be contaminated by the baggage of the past? Or can we finally leave that toxin behind and start anew with a fresh slate?"
Mrs McAleese, speaking at the national novena in Knock, Co Mayo, said that in celebrating the millennium most public attention seemed to have focused on festivities and monuments, on the face rather than the substance of the event.
"The core of this great jubilee - the celebration of 2,000 years since the birth of Christ - seems to have been largely drowned out. In a modern pluralist society, it is unsurprising, even appropriate, that the secular aspect of the celebration should have a significant place as a means of including all people regardless of their beliefs or absence of religious belief in the special magic of the millennium.
"Sensitivity to that perspective is essential, but sensitivity should not mean an embarrassed silence about the remarkable story the coming millennium will mark.
"Our pluralist society cannot count it as an advance if the pendulum has now swung from the strict and restrictive religious hegemony of the past to an equally rigid form of secular strait-jacketing, where any mention of a religious or spiritual dimension is stereotyped as naive or out of touch, marginal or divisive."
Mrs McAleese said it had been seen in Northern Ireland that change, however tentative, was always possible. "That change may sometimes seem too small to measure, too heartbreakingly slow to describe as progress. But it does exist. Unless each of us takes individual responsibility for keeping the flame of hope alive, we are condemning a new generation to live through the misery of the past, on a road going nowhere."
She added that one of the most intractable of all divisions was between the haves and have-nots, between the centre and the margins, those who seemed to be centre-stage and those who felt they were always spectators.
"In responding to Christ's invitation to reach out to those from whom we are estranged, one of the least visible but most damaging forms of estrangement is caused by social exclusion."
