The President, Mrs McAleese, has asserted that those hurt or damaged by the exercise of free speech by others, such as nationalists who felt humiliated by Orange marches, must be given the means to be heard in response.
In a wide-ranging address to the Irish Times/Harvard University Colloquium last night, Mrs McAleese posed the question of how societies must respond when the exercise by some of their right to free speech is offensive, hurtful or damaging to others.
Mrs McAleese's address, to an audience of diplomats, academics, business people and prominent Irish-Americans at the University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, came after a day of other events in Boston on the second full day of her visit to the city.
Mrs McAleese returns to Dublin tomorrow morning.
Yesterday morning the President laid a wreath at Boston's new Famine memorial, an outdoor sculpture in a small park in the city's downtown area. The memorial has separate elements intended to portray both Famine suffering and the personal triumphs of those who came to the US.
"This memorial represents a painful and momentous part of our history", the President told the crowd of some 200 Irish-Americans and others who gathered at the memorial yesterday morning. "It represents, too, survival and courage, and overcoming adversity of the hardest kind."
She said she knew the site had become a place for reflection and learning, not just for Irish people but for other nationalities, too. "We seek not to apportion blame, rather to honour those who were lost, to acknowledge those who survived and who found a life here."
Mrs McAleese was accompanied by her husband, Dr Martin McAleese, the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Ms Liz O'Donnell, and the Irish Ambassador to the US, Mr Sean O hUiginn.
The Mayor of Boston, Mr Thomas Menino, who also spoke at the memorial, later held a reception for the President. "Irish people came to this city to survive," he said, "and as they survived they flourished in the face of adversity. Through the tenacity of the Irish people the tragedy of the Great Hunger was turned into triumph."
He paid tribute to Mrs McAleese, saying she was the first Irish President from Northern Ireland, and that she had "brought the country together as no other president in recent years."
Later, in her address at Harvard on freedom of speech, Mrs McAleese said the demands by Orangemen to "march the queen's highway" could be seen as a demand to exercise the right to free speech.
In the United States, she said, incidents such as the placing of a burning cross, a symbol of racist persecution, in the grounds of a black family home in St Paul, Minnesota, in 1992, or the demands of a Nazi group in 1977 to march through the largely Jewish village of Skokie, Illinois, could also be seen as demands to exercise this right to free speech.
Yet clearly the exercise of freedom of speech in these cases would be experienced by others "as personally oppressive and humiliating, especially (although not exclusively) by the weak, the powerless and the deprived.
"I do not dispute the thesis that to embrace freedom of speech means having to listen to things which we do not like and things with which we profoundly disagree," she went on. But it was essential that those who felt wounded by hateful expression had an effective means of being heard in response.