President Mary McAleese has said that, although Ireland owes much of its recent success to expanding access to education, there was much work to be done to make society more inclusive.
In a keynote address at Syracuse University in upstate New York, Mrs McAleese said Ireland's past had shown that if only a fraction of talent is empowered, only a fraction of potential will be realised.
"We have a job to do to complete the true social order our constitution sets out as our shared ambition as a people. Tackling educational disadvantage, ending the waste of marginalisation, these are destinations we want to get to and quickly."
The President's address marked the centenary of the university's school of education, which has pioneered efforts to make education more inclusive of diverse communities and making it possible for people with disabilities to participate in mainstream classes.
At the College of Law disability rights clinic, Mrs McAleese met student lawyers who offer legal representation to marginalised people who are often unable to find it elsewhere.
Some of the people the students represent cannot afford to pay a lawyer and others have been rejected by lawyers who cannot accommodate clients with disabilities.
Mrs McAleese said the embrace of diversity she saw at Syracuse could serve as an inspiration for a country such as Ireland which is seeking to create a tolerant society that welcomes difference.
"You have given a voice to the voiceless, confidence to the self-effacing and a place in the mainstream to those confined to the margins by life's caprice and happenstance.
"In other words, you have something truly wonderful and humanly redemptive to celebrate, for you have become champions against the waste of human life and human potential, champions of opportunities offered rather than opportunities missed."
The president flew to Syracuse from Atlanta, where she viewed a collection of papers from Northern poets at Emory College and saw students perform a reading of Seamus Heaney's poem St Kevin and the Blackbird.
She said Ireland's recent prosperity, although welcome, was not all the country should aspire to. "It's not enough. It doesn't make us humanitarians and it doesn't make good people of us . . . That's why we need the poems. That's why we need the poets."
Mrs McAleese travels to New York City today, where she will visit Irish emigration centres and attend a performance of The Pirate Queen on Broadway.