The President, Mrs McAleese, has drawn on the often harsh economic and social experience of the Irish woman immigrant in Britain in the 19th century and again in the 1950s to urge today's generation of Irish women in Britain to bridge the gap of emigration.
With economic prosperity in Ireland being largely achieved and sustained by the participation of women in public and professional spheres, Mrs McAleese praised the work of the Women's Irish Network (WIN) at a lunch in London yesterday in "championing" successive generations in their personal and professional lives in Britain.
The WIN was launched in January to foster business contacts and relationships between Irishwomen in Britain and also to raise funds for the Irish Youth Foundation.
Research carried out by Ms Clare Barrington - whose husband Mr Edward Barrington, is the Irish Ambassador to Britain - in Irish Women in England provides a depressing analysis of occupational change.
Despite substantially higher formal qualifications, the social mobility of Irish women between 1951 and 1981 in Britain is lower than that of either Irish men or the population as a whole.
Reflecting on that shifting pattern of emigration, Mrs McAleese told the WIN lunch at the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park Hotel: "With this in mind, it could be argued that the female Irish economic and social emigrants of the 1950s had a lot more in common with their compatriots of a century earlier than with the more recent influx of Irish women in the 1980s and 1990s . . . This is, to a certain extent, a forum in which the gap between those who emigrated in the 1950s and before and those who have emigrated in more recent times, can be bridged.
"The lives of those who endured hard times at home and here but who believed in better times to come, hoped for them, prayed for them - those lives are indicated in your success today. They would be proud of your accomplishments, as I am proud of them." For too many generations, Ireland, like the rest of the world, had "corralled and wasted the full talents and wisdom of women." However, she said that was changing.