The gap between rich and poor continued to widen despite Ireland's economic growth, the President, Mrs McAleese, warned yesterday.
"Those whose boats are beached remain static, bogged down in unemployment, poverty, discrimination, disadvantage and exclusion, made all the harder to bear by the growing self-confidence and success all around them," she said at an anti-racism conference hosted by the Tipperary Rural Travellers' Project.
A change in attitude would allow the State to grow into "the confident, diverse, inclusive society that all our citizens deserve".
Ireland should be proud of its economic progress but there was still "a distance to travel", she said, pointing to reports comparing poverty levels in other countries.
Mrs McAleese continued the theme at the opening of the community service centre's Garden of Remembrance.
"Amidst our current prosperity are thousands of Irish people who remain trapped in a vicious circle of poverty, unemployment, exclusion and despair," she said.
"They need reassurance that their day, too, is coming, that they are not forgotten."
She said voluntary community organisations played an important part in the lives of such people.
The Garden of Remembrance was established by the Tipperary Active Retirement Association to mark last year's International Year of the Older Person.
Tipperary was "blessed" in having "an energetic community council, first established by Canon Hayes in 1937 as the first unit of Muintir na Tire", Mrs McAleese said.
Canon Hayes would have been delighted to see so many "doers" getting out and playing their part in the community, she said. The President also unveiled a plaque to commemorate the former Tipperary Grammar School in the town. "There is enough history, famous people and court cases associated with this school to fill a library," she said. "It is remarkably rich in stories and legends." Senior members of the Church of Ireland were educated at the Erasmus Smith school, as it was formerly known, along with the Fenian leader, John O'Leary, and Thomas McCarthy, who was involved in founding the GAA.
The Taoiseach's adviser, Dr Martin Mansergh, as well as his father and uncles, were also educated at the school. From its roots as an Augustinian abbey in the Middle Ages "to the modern-day Abbey CBS", the site had been "an important centre of engraving" on young lives, Mrs McAleese said.