Aid for developing countries is not an optional extra but an essential component of global stability and security, the President, Mrs McAleese, has said.
Mrs McAleese told Trócaire's annual lecture at St Patrick's College, Maynooth, last night it was a "dangerous myth" that aid was a one-way process driven by altruism. The truth was that Ireland was as dependent on the success of poorer countries as those countries were on Irish generosity towards them.
"There is a pathos in their gratitude which should not blind us to the fact that our outreach to the developing world is an investment as much in Ireland's future as it is in the future of Africa or South America. The tangible benefits of peace, stability and prosperity need no enunciation," she said.
Mrs McAleese told her audience that this interdependence of nations had become all the clearer since the events of September 11th. "We now know with a dramatic clarity that we cannot hermetically seal ourselves from the effects of things that happen thousands of miles away.
"We are a global human family and most of that family is living in great pools of poverty and hopelessness, fertile breeding grounds for political or religious fundamentalism . . . for the frustration of talented men and women who never know the joy of their own talents revealed and whose anger ferments into distilled hatred, the most powerful weapon on the planet."
Mrs McAleese said it was "sickening" that development assistance from rich countries had fallen to a historic low over the past decade and she urged Ireland to maintain the example by continuing to move swiftly towards the United Nations aid target of 0.7 per cent of gross national product.
She praised the role of Trócaire as champion of the overlooked people of the world and said it reflected well on the Irish that the organisation's annual Lenten Campaign was so strongly supported.
Mrs McAleese said Irish generosity was also being tested on home ground by the arrival of immigrants and she urged society to rise to meet the challenge.
"Out of the distilled wisdom of the bitter experience of our own history of emigration, the Irish should have little to learn about the dangers of racism, of malicious stereotyping, of slammed doors, of being alone. Yet we know that there are those in our society on whom those lessons have been lost."