The President, Mrs McAleese, has said that Irish people have a duty to ensure that the peace opportunities presented by the Belfast Agreement are not squandered. She was speaking during a one-day visit to the North yesterday.
Her first engagement was at Our Lady and St Patrick's College in Knock, outside Belfast. She then visited Lisburn Linen Centre. Addressing students at Our Lady and St Patrick's, Mrs McAleese said it was important to remember what the agreement represented as its anniversary approached.
"The agreement, as its opening words suggest, offers a truly historic opportunity for a new beginning. For the sake of all the generations who dreamed of peace, for our own sakes, and for the sake of the generations that will come after us, each of us has a solemn duty to do all we can to ensure that we seize that opportunity with both hands.
"While our politicians are working day and night to put flesh to the bones of the agreement, each one of us has a vital role to play. The things we do can bring more respect in the world, can encourage others to be more respectful, can provoke change - just as casual words of cynicism or sectarianism can keep the toxin of hatred alive and eat away at our hearts and hopes."
The President said that for too long the two great traditions and cultures on this island had viewed each other from afar. "Kept apart by separate memories, separate histories and separate hopes, our physical closeness to each other masked an awful reality that we did not and do not truly, deeply know each other and, worse than that, we think we know each other very well.
"But when the people of Ireland, North and South, endorsed the agreement last May in such overwhelming numbers we realised the common `Yesness' there was in us, the common determination to change.
"We turned away from the terrible hurts which we have inflicted on each other in the past and consciously set ourselves a new course, a new future."
Mrs McAleese said the people had committed themselves to "a great project of reconciliation".
"We know it is a process. There are many hurts to heal, trusts to build and things to unlearn. But the prize is a people focused on building up a better future for all our children, a place where the casual cruelties of life itself will be enough to cope with, without the man-made cruelties which have skewed our history, bringing a trail of wrecked lives in its path."