Given a culture steeped in the emigrant tradition, President Mary McAleese has said the Irish people now have the challenge and chance to make the emigrant experience in Ireland something to be truly proud of.
In a keynote speech to mark St Patrick's Day, Mrs McAleese was addressing the British Council in London on "The Changing Faces of Ireland - Migration and Multiculturalism".
She spoke of a "fortunate first generation" of Irish men and women enjoying an "abundance" of opportunity at home - encouraging them to regard themselves as "in some ways the sacred stewards", recognising Ireland's own past experience as the challenge in "drawing newcomers deeply and happily into every facet of Irish society" and "to get the debate right".
The President told a distinguished and enthusiastic audience that in the "new Ireland", a fascinating work was in progress building "a future of lives entwined, not with the bramble and ivy of intolerance but with the cement of mutual dependence and mutual respect".
A fascinating future was evolving of precisely the kind hoped for by those who had founded the European Union - a place where people could be fully themselves and yet share a common future, "a common homeland", she said, where people could live happily and yet with their own individual identity.
It was a tribute to the power of that union, said Mrs McAleese, that "the relationship between Ireland and Great Britain matured and blossomed into a firm, respectful friendship during the testing and tough times of the Northern Ireland Troubles."
She described the rugby international at Croke Park two weeks ago as "a moving and heart-warming affirmation of the contemporary friendship between England and Ireland".
While the final score was hard for England to swallow, the President added, "in truth the day was a win for human decency, for moving on, for focusing on the future and on being good neighbours to one another".
In the context of yesterday's lecture, President McAleese stressed the role of civic society in welcoming and integrating newcomers.
"It is in the schools, on the streets, in the supermarkets, at the doctors, in the workplace, that human beings experience the smile and handshake that reassures them or the snub that drives them to despair."
She underlined this, first speaking with characteristic passion about the "courage" needed to be an emigrant.
"You need courage to be an emigrant; to be a stranger with a heartbreaking loneliness for home and a deep human need to be made feel at home in a new homeland.
"Many face the isolating barriers of language, religion, colour, ignorance and bigotry," she added. "You need determination to transcend all these things that drain away your self-belief, and at the same time you have to work with determination to make a better life for yourself and your family, to prove your worth."
Mrs McAleese continued: "This is all very familiar territory to the Irish and we hope our distilled wisdom and experience will enable us to ensure rapid and easy melding of our new citizens into Irish life.
"Of all the people on the planet we have no excuse for getting it wrong and a lot of work is going into getting it right.
"What is perhaps unique to the Irish situation now is the speed and scale of change for we have absorbed in one decade what many other so-called 'countries of immigration' absorbed over many decades if not centuries."