The President, Mrs McAleese, led the mourners at the funeral of Pte Brendan Fitzpatrick to his local church in Raheen, near Portlaoise, late on Saturday evening.
Nearly 2,000 people attended the ceremony. Shock was evident in the faces of many of the young people.
Many spoke of the young man who had scored 600 points in his Leaving Cert and could have had his choice of university places. Instead he joined the Army as a private in June 1998.
Before the moving ceremony in the hilltop church, the President met his grieving family to express her own sorrow at his death.
She spent five minutes with his parents, Anthony and Breda, who is principal teacher in the local national school at Barnashrone, and with Brendan's brothers, Killian, Cormac and Ciaran, before the Requiem Mass.
The principal celebrant, Father Tom Dillon, parish priest of Raheen, spoke of Brendan's popularity in the area and of his lifelong ambition to become a soldier.
He said he would remember with affection the young man who played guitar and sometimes wrote lyrics, and who loved life and people.
"Although he was a very young man and had a very short life, he had a great insight into people. He was wholesome and open and saw life and people as being good," he told the congregation, which included the Minister for Defence, Mr Smith, the Chief-of-Staff, Lt-Gen David Stapleton, and the Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin, the Most Rev Laurence Ryan.
One of the gifts brought to the altar during the offertory was the 19-year-old soldier's United Nations service medal. The congregation included many comrades who had returned from Lebanon for the funeral.
After the Mass the remains were removed from the church by a bearer party of 10 men under the command of Sgt Patrick Doyle of Brendan's unit, Support Company, 3rd Infantry Battalion.
The cortege was led into St Fintan's Cemetery by an escort party drawn from A Company, 3rd Battalion, Curragh Camp, and a party of 30 former colleagues lined the entrance to the graveyard.
The band of the Western Brigade, under the baton of Lt Declan Whitson, rendered the funeral marches as the coffin, draped in both the Tricolour and the UN flag, was carried to the grave.
Following the traditional salute from a firing party, trumpeters Sgt Gerry Leacy and Cpl Paul Hennessy, and drummer Sgt Dave Colgan, all local men, played the Last Post and Reveille, bringing the ceremony to an end.