On the last night of her State visit to Canada yesterday the President, Mrs McAleese, described her 13-day trip as "magnificently successful".
She was speaking at a dinner in St Johns given by the Lieutenant Governor of Newfoundland, Mr Arthur Maxwell House.
The island, she said, was the most Irish place outside Ireland, with a large proportion of the population being of Irish stock, mostly from the south-eastern counties.
The Premier, Mr Brian Tobin, whose family came from Ireland in the 1840s and who is very familiar with Ireland, is away this week and unable to greet the President.
Newfoundland and Labrador is a vast province with a population of only about 500,000 in its few towns and outlying fishing posts. Huge expanses in the interior are virtually empty and frozen.
In the capital, St Johns, yesterday it was overcast, misty and dull with a fresh breeze and light rain: a very Irish day.
Mrs McAleese and her party arrived from Quebec to meet the Ireland Business Partnership. She said how taken she was with the tremendous similarities evident between Newfoundland and Ireland, especially in the accents, mannerisms, humour and attitudes of the people.
She noticed the strong Irish influence in the street names, in the phrases of Irish derivation used in local speech and in many aspects of the local culture. She felt very much at home.
Generations ago many Irish people had come to live in Newfoundland and Labrador. Now a Memorandum of Understanding covered co-operation between the two governments in social, cultural and economic affairs.
At a reception for the Irish community she said the earliest record of an Irish inhabitant on the island was in 1622, when one was discovered hunting beaver with some Indians near Cape St Mary's.
Later they became the dominant nationality around St Johns. Philip Francis Little, an Irishman, was the first premier of Newfoundland. Kinship had been rediscovered of late after a period of losing sight of each other.
There had been more reciprocal visits between the two islands at the political, official and business level in the past two years than literally for generations before.
At the dinner the President said the Vikings were believed to have briefly colonised Newfoundland about 1,000 years ago, but the Irish were said to have arrived several centuries earlier. She liked to believe that St Brendan had landed in his leather boat.
It was the only part of north America which had a specific name in Irish, Talamh an Eisc. Like others the Irish had first come for fish.