President Mary McAleese yesterday stood firmly by her statement last Sunday in which she represented Ireland as a country which "abhorred" the publication of the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Asked what she had to say to Irish people who insisted that she did not speak for them, she said: "First of all, I am the President of Ireland and that speaks for itself. Secondly, before I left Ireland I was fully briefed by the Government on their view and as you know the European Union is exactly, on all fours, line for line, with the view that I expressed in Saudi Arabia."
She addressed the issue, Mrs McAleese said, not in her speech to the economic forum but in the context of a question asked at a press conference: "And so I reiterated the view that is the European Union's view . . . which is that we abhor the violence that broke out in the wake of the publication of the cartoons, but at the same time we also abhor the fact that anyone would be so insensitive to another faith."
She added that she had no difficulty with people expressing their views. "What is disappointing is that people don't read everything. They don't read the whole thing. For example, I have read letters to the press which said 'why didn't you complain about the violence?' But of course you [ the media], who asked the question, know perfectly well that the answer I gave was all of a piece, that we abhor the violence, that the violence was completely unacceptable and should be unacceptable anywhere in the world."
On the final day of her visit to Jordan, she also addressed her decision to deliver a speech in Saudi Arabia to a forum where women were segregated behind a screen.
Mrs McAleese said that going to Saudi Arabia was standing with the women in Saudi and the men who support them, who were being very courageous in trying to bring about the kind of change that people in Ireland "claim" to want for Saudi women.
The people at home were quite entitled to look askance at cultures where, for example, women play such a terribly repressed role, she said.
"And I think it is important that we would have a culture that would want to see big changes, because we have come that journey ourselves and we're able to tell others just how important it has been to us.
"So in one way to have people who are passionate about that is a very good thing. It shows people who care and are interested. At the same time, what we do not want is a world where, because we are so very, very different, we decide never to talk to one another. Because in that, I think, lie the seeds of tremendous dangers for our world."