The President, Mrs McAleese, said yesterday she had not made up her mind whether to seek a second period in office when her seven-year term expires at the end of next year.
She would decide, in consultation with her husband, Martin, in the "early part of next year" whether to put her name forward for the election due in November 2004.
"I love the job," she added. "I relish being President of Ireland at a time when there is so much good news to tell the world. A lot of Irish presidents didn't have that privilege."
Mrs McAleese was replying to questions from Irish reporters on the final day of a three-day visit to Chicago to promote Ireland and US-Irish business ties.
Now in the last 18 months of her seven-year term, her strategy as Ireland's "primary ambassador" was, she said, to underpin the efforts to maintain Ireland's new role as an economically successful and dynamic country, especially now when it needed to be kept from "the colder winds of economic downturn".
Her message in Chicago has been relentlessly upbeat. In her speeches - yesterday she addressed the Kellogg School of Management and the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations - she assures audiences that the Belfast Agreement had transformed Ireland utterly and that there was only "a whisker of a bridge" to cross to keep the peace process on course.
Mrs McAleese underlines on every occasion the economic transformation of Ireland and the crucial role of the economic relationship with the United States.
This, she said, has made Ireland, which is the only English-speaking country in the euro zone, the recipient of a third of all US software investment in the EU and a tenth of all medical investment.
Yesterday she included for the first time a notable statistic, taken from a recent Johns Hopkins University report on US-EU ties, that Ireland is now the ninth-largest source of foreign direct investment into the United States.
The popular opposition in Ireland to the war in Iraq did not seem to have made any negative impression in Chicago, Mrs McAleese told reporters.
In three days not one person mentioned the war, which "seems to be over in people's minds" and she had been astounded by the extent to which people focused on the economy.
Today Mrs McAleese travels to Charlottesville, Virginia, where she will give the opening address at a conference of Irish artists, writers and politicians entitled "Reimagining Ireland".