President Mary McAleese has urged people to put social concern and ethical behaviour first as Ireland returns to growth after the recession.
She was speaking as she delivered the first Barat lecture at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Mount Anville, in Dublin this morning. Sophie Barat founded the Society of the Sacred Heart in France in 1800 and was canonised in 1925 and named Saint Madeleine.
Mrs McAleese said the economic crisis was "fundamentally a collapse of ethics" and was fuelled by a movement away from social concern and by a movement right into the heart of selfish concern.
"What happened...in our own country really is characterised by almost a complete abandonment of social concern in some quarters, a much greater concern with the self, with bonuses, with me, and not with the more general world around."
She said this generation had had a "chastening and horrible" lesson in what could happen when people lost sight of social concern.
"In a way we are challenged in our time now to remember how important those values are, to respect them once again anew, to put social concern, and that is concern for the whole of the human person, the whole of humanity, at the heart of what we do and the decisions that we make," Mrs McAleese said.
She said she hoped her Barat lecture would be first in a series of such events at the school.
