The President, Mrs McAleese, highlighted the dark side of the Irish economic revival - in particular the abuse of alcohol and drugs - as well as its enormous benefits, in a speech prepared for the opening of a conference on a future Ireland in Charlottesville, Virginia, last night.
Mrs McAleese called for an Ireland which would cease to tolerate this "stupid" behaviour. "More money in pockets has visibly lifted standards of living but it is being badly spent too, on bad habits that have never gone away," she said.
"The Irish love of conviviality has its dark side in the stupid, wasteful abuse of alcohol and its first cousin - abuse of drugs. They chart a course of misery and malaise so utterly unnecessary that we need to re-imagine an Ireland grown intolerant of behaviour which it has too benignly overlooked for too long."
Mrs McAleese also drew attention to the fact that many Irish people had been unable to benefit from the success story which other countries wanted to emulate.
"The widespread embrace of prosperity has been a wonderful and heartening phenomenon," she said, "but if you are still marooned on the beach and the uplifted boats are sailing over the horizon, the space between can seem a frightening, unbridgeable chasm."
Also among the casualties of the new Ireland were the "many excellent nuns, priests and brothers who dedicated their lives to education and health care, both in Ireland and around the world and who contributed greatly to this ripening Ireland with its network of friends around the globe.
"Now they are visibly ageing and their future is far from easy to predict," she told the conference, organised by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and entitled "Re-imagining Ireland".
Attended by figures from the arts, politics, education and journalism from both parts of Ireland, the four-day gathering is intended as a "reflective re-envisioning of Ireland" and an exploration of "the meaning of Ireland for the world as a modern and prosperous, yet traditional culture," according to its project director, Mr Andrew Higgins Wyndham.
Mrs McAleese said that "old vanities of history" were now disappearing in Ireland. "Carefully hidden stories like those of the Irish who died in the first World War are coming out of the shoe boxes in the attic and into daylight."
"Who could ever have imagined that an Irish Government would purchase the site of the Battle of the Boyne and develop there a heritage site for all the people of the island of Ireland?
"Someone dared to and its existence changes language and texture forever.
"Who could have imagined a government in Northern Ireland with Sinn Féin ministers working side by side with the Ulster Unionists?" Someone dared to and we fervently hope it will move from the imagination to lived reality again soon.
"Who could have imagined Gaelscoileanna flourishing right around the country with Irish language nursery, primary and secondary schools a growing phenomenon in Northern Ireland?
"Who could have imagined the cultural exuberance which has made global icons of Irish names in every field of the arts, many of them under this roof, or the technological sophistication that has made Ireland the world's number one exporter of computer software, ahead even of the United States itself?"
No other generation in Ireland had come so close to achieving peace, prosperity, equality, justice, opportunity, reconciliation and world renown, she said, but "Ireland is still "unfinished business".
Its successes in connectedness and its ease of intimacy could appear as "a powerful wall of exclusion for some of those who look at us with doubt and mistrust", she said.
This put an onus on those who imagined a reconciled Ireland to actively promote the culture of "fáilte" to reluctant neighbours north of the Border.