The President, Mrs McAleese, is attending the official ceremony commemorating the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz in Poland today.
Speaking this morning, the President said the way to honour the millions of people who lost their lives during the Second World War was to focus on the messages parents send to children and the actions people take when they come across bigotry.
President McAleese
"All you and I can do in the present is do what we can to invest in the present in such a way that the future does not become as sordid and as inhumanly decent as the past was," she told RTÉ radio during an interview.
Asked whether Ireland should apologise for Eamon de Valera, the-then taoiseach who offered condolences on the death of Adolf Hitler, the President said there were many things to be ashamed of during that time in Ireland.
"I doubt very much that there is a country in Europe that cannot hang its head in shame at some of the things it did do and some of the things it neglected to do."
She added: "Is there an apology that is big enough to ever, ever, ever blot out the dreadful consequences of what happened at Auschwitz and Birkenau? I'm sure if there was such a construct, if there was such a thing the world would have found it by now."
She warned that people must not forget the lessons from Nazism and that it was regular people who allowed the deaths to take place.
"People from ordinary everyday walks of life - bank clerks, shop assistants, doctors, lawyers - transformed themselves into the most extraordinary killing machines driven by an utterly evil ideology that seemed to captivate the minds, not just of German people but of many people right across Europe," she said.
Some 1.2 million people, 90 per cent of them Jews, perished in the gas chambers and crematoriums of the concentration camp during the World War Two Holocaust that killed six million Jews in all.
Participants in the ceremony include former prisoners of the camp; former soldiers of Russia's Red Army, which liberated the camp; the Russian President, Mr Vladimir Putin; and the Israeli President, Mr Moshe Katsav.
Mrs McAleese will place a lighted candle at the Monument to the Victims of Fascism and sign a remembrance book on behalf of the people of Ireland.
The French president, Mr Jacques Chirac; President Horst Koehler of Germany; and the US Vice-President, Mr Dick Cheney, will be among the heads of state and government in attendance.