The President, Mrs McAleese, just loves her job and for four days this week she bounced around Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia bringing the good tidings of the roaring Irish Celtic Tiger and of imminent permanent peace in Northern Ireland.
"I just feel very energised by all that," she said on the last day of her visit. "I'm more than energised by it. I'm also very convinced of the need to keep talking positively about it . . I think it's a great job to have at this time."
Although it was not a state visit, the Secret Service and local police gave her the full treatment as cavalcades of 20 and more vehicles rushed through crowded streets with sirens blaring and motorcycle outriders brought traffic to a halt.
There was an anti-bomb squad and a SWAT team with helmets, flak jackets and high-powered rifles sitting outside the Baltimore City Hall while the President received honorary citizen ship from the handsome young Irish-American mayor, Martin O'Malley, who also has his own Celtic rock band. The new Ireland was meeting the new Irish-America.
Mostly, the President met admiring lines of older Irish-Americans who fell under her relaxed charm and laughed at her jokes. Asked at the Kennedy Centre after a lecture on the "Politics, Culture and Identity" of Ireland what her role was in healing an Irish psyche damaged by the torrent of scandals back home, the President quipped: "You got up very, very early with that question."
Then she went on to answer it. If there is corruption in Irish society and public life, "it is much better that we know it . . . Bring the dark side out, put the spotlight on it, heal it and move on."
Of course "it is a cause of heartbreak" when people find that those they trusted in public office "could have let them down. That's going to be a very hard thing for people to live with." But "out of that experience comes a much healthier way forward". Bring out the corruption. "If it's in the open, you can deal with it. If it's not it festers."
It would have been easier to say: "I prefer not to comment on that subject until the various tribunals have reported," but that's not her way.
In her address about the exciting new Ireland, the President said, almost as an aside, that in the country "once full of religious certainties, convents and monasteries now close quietly and a prevailing angst has ousted complacency, the nation having, of course, realised Cardinal Newman's ambition for an educated laity."
Asked by a priest in the audience to develop this further, the President said institutional religion "is feeling the sharp wind of a people who talk back". The church "educated us to talk and to think, so we talk back now".
Ruairi Quinn when minister for finance got into some trouble back home when he spoke in Chicago in August 1996 about a "post-Christian Ireland". He is still having to explain what he meant. But Mrs McAleese clearly feels few inhibitions about speaking her mind, and this is refreshing.
This correspondent recalls accompanying President Hillery to China and the insistence of a senior civil servant on sitting in on a media briefing to the three Irish correspondents in case the President strayed from government policy.
Mrs McAleese has no problem going along to the Washington Post editorial board and briefing them on the "vulnerability and fledgling nature" of the peace process and talking about the "scepticism" of unionists.
But when Mrs Mary Robinson told this correspondent during a visit to Japan that unionists had reason to be concerned about the implications of the government's "Framework Document" of February 1995, the then tanaiste, Dick Spring, let it be known that she had overstepped the limits.
As Mrs McAleese finished her American tour in Philadelphia, I asked her if after almost three years in office she was finding the traditional restraints of the Presidency a problem. To help her, or maybe provoke her, I added: "You seem to be able to talk quite freely on anything, whereas the traditional view used to be that a president articulated Government policy."
The President cut in: "That kind of answers your question."
Members of her staff sitting in the background roared with laughter at the naivety of the question and the oneupmanship of the answer.
Becoming serious, the President went on: "I'd like to think I operate within the constitutional bounds that exist, and there are clear bounds. I don't think that they in any way prevent me from coming here and talking with love and passion about the country I come from and the country I love.
"The story is so good that this is an easy time to talk about Ireland. There have been other people in other times for whom the story wasn't so good . . . Frankly I don't think the Constitution obliges any president to articulate government policy.
"I am very comfortable in the role, thankfully. I also feel very privileged that until this time very few people have lived in an Ireland that has such economic success behind it." Her parents, she said, grew up in an Ireland where the body language was "to keep the head down".
For her it was heads up all the way to Philadephia. And while she was there she met her aunt and cousins who had emigrated from the old Ireland and had once welcomed her as a student looking for a summer job.