The President has strongly defended both the 1916 Rising and Irish nationalism against those who claim that these are narrow and sectarian components of Irish history.
Mrs McAleese said last night that the source of the accusations that the Rising was an exclusive and sectarian enterprise was probably the "tendency for powerful and pitiless elites to dismiss with damning labels those who oppose them".
However, those who had proclaimed the Rising were "our idealistic and heroic founding fathers and mothers, our Davids to their Goliaths".
The President's remarks, at the opening of a conference in UCC last night on the Rising, mark a further move to bring the 1916 Rising back to a central place in the official establishment view of Irish history.
The Taoiseach's announcement late last year that the traditional 1916 parade past Dublin's GPO is to be reinstated for this year's 90th anniversary, came after over three decades of dispute over how the physical force tradition represented by the Rising should be marked, in the light of the violence in Northern Ireland.
Mr Ahern said then: "The Irish people need to reclaim the spirit of 1916, which is not the property of those who have abused and debased the title of republicanism", a reference to contemporary republican paramilitaries.
The Government Secretariat saw and approved the President's speech in advance, in accord with normal procedure.
President McAleese received an enthusiastic reception for her speech from the 200 or so guests at the Aula Maxima in UCC at the start of the weekend conference.
She said that some people could not use the word "nationalism" without putting the word "narrow" before it. It was British imperialism, and not Irish nationalism, which had had a narrowing effect in this country. The outward-looking nature of Irish nationalism was "so often frustrated by our proximity to a strong imperial power - a power which feared our autonomy, and whose global imperialism ironically was experienced as narrowing and restrictive to those who lived under it." Despite the "apparent naivety" of the words of the 1916 Proclamation, that document's content had evolved into what was now a widely shared political philosophy of equality and social inclusion.
She said the social agenda of the Rising had represented an unrealisable aspiration for many years - "until now that is, when our prosperity has created a real opportunity for ending poverty and promoting true equality of opportunity for our people."
She had a strong impression that to its enemies, "both in Ireland and abroad, Irish nationalism looked like a version of the imperialism it opposed" and that it favoured "the domination of one cultural and ethnic tradition over others. It is easy to see how they might have fallen into that mistaken view, but mistaken they were."
Irish nationalism had never been narrow, she went on, but had been a multilateral enterprise from the start. It had been "attempting to escape the dominance of a single class and, in our case a largely foreign class, into a wider world."
Many Irish nationalists were members of the Catholic Church, "a universal church which brought them into contact with a vastly wider segment of the world than that open to even the most travelled imperial English gentleman". Many of the leaders also had experience of "North America with its vibrant attachment to liberty and democracy. Others of them were active participants in the international working class movements of their day."
She said that because this year was the 90th anniversary of both the 1916 Rising and the Battle of the Somme, it had "the potential to be a pivotal year for peace and reconciliation, to be a time of shared pride for the divided grandchildren of those who died whether at Messines or in Kilmainham".