The Northern Ireland and Middle East peace processes were discussed by the President, Mrs McAleese, and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt when they met in Sharm el-Sheikh yesterday.
Mrs McAleese; Dr Martin McAleese; the Minister for Defence, Mr Smith; and the Irish Ambassador to Egypt, Mr Peter Gunning, flew from Cairo in the Government jet to the Egyptian Red Sea resort.
After returning to Cairo at noon, Mrs McAleese and her party spent the rest of the day sightseeing at the Egyptian National Museum, where she saw the Tutankhamun exhibition, and at Giza, where she saw the Pyramids and the Sphinx. The presidential party was escorted by armed soldiers and police, and the roads were cleared for her cavalcade. As she viewed the Sphinx, a group of American tourists sang a verse of When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.
Mrs McAleese said it had been "a fulfilment of a life's ambition to see the exquisite majesty and brilliance of part of our human heritage".
Last night she attended a reception at the Irish residency hosted by Mr and Mrs Gunning. Among the 200-plus guests were four Irish Carmelite nuns from an enclosed convent at Fayoum, an oasis south-west of Cairo. This morning Mrs McAleese will fly to Oman for a four-day State visit.
Yesterday's breakfast meeting at Sharm el-Sheikh, where President Mubarak has a residence, was at the Jolie Ville golf resort, the location for last month's Middle East peace summit attended by President Clinton, Mr Ehud Barak and Mr Yasser Arafat.
Yesterday's discussions lasted over an hour and were dominated by the two peace processes. Mrs McAleese said they concentrated on the need for a two-pronged approach, a clear leadership which would focus on the future and take risks, and secondly, the need to offer people hope for justice, peace and prosperity. Mr Mubarak, she said, wanted prosperity, jobs and education for his country because that was the way forward. There was a literacy problem in Egypt, particularly among women, and he was interested in the links between Irish economic growth and education.
She said the journey the Irish peace process had come through was of interest to him and, as with the Middle East, there were strengths and hopeful signs on the horizon. "There was no doubt that he is worried, but he is even-handed and there was a tremendous generosity of spirit in him," the President said.
The Egyptian President, she said, seemed to have a fairly keen interest in Irish affairs and recognised that peace was not just about signing agreements. It was the follow-through that was essential, and one had to have the leadership to do that.
Mrs McAleese thanked Mr Mubarak for Egypt's vote for Ireland in the contest for the UN Security Council. He told her he would like to come to Ireland in the future.