The Minister for Education said the victims of the Holocaust must never be forgotten.
More than six million Jews were murdered in Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War along with hundreds of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, gypsies, homosexuals and political opponents.
Speaking at the fourth Irish Holocaust Memorial Day, Mary Hanafin said the Holocaust represented our darkest hour in modern history. "Here was a systematic effort to exterminate an entire people, not for what they had done or for any threat that they posed, but simply for who they were. It represents evil on an unimaginable scale, defying description or comprehension," she said.
She paid tribute to the four Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who are now living in Ireland and said that it was society's task to remember what had happened.
"It is essential that we do that through education, through our commitment to stable and positive international relations, and through our respect for and protection of the dignity of everyone in society irrespective of race, creed, colour or ability."
Ms Hanafin said that knowledge and understanding were the greatest tools in the fight against the evils of intolerance, racism, anti-semitism and xenophobia. "We cannot be complacent. We cannot conclude that the horrors of the Holocaust are beyond modern civilised behaviour. Sadly, we can look to very recent examples of genocide and ethnic cleansing in Rwanda, in the former Yugoslavia and in Cambodia. We see too the shocking ongoing events in Darfur."
The Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony at the Mansion House was financed by a €25,000 from the Government.
The Government has also established a Holocaust Educational Trust, which has brought an Anne Frank exhibition to Dublin and helped primary schoolchildren to plant yellow crocus bulbs in memory of all the children who died in the Holocaust.
The Minister for Justice Michael McDowell said that while the previous year's ceremony remembered the victims of the Auschwitz concentration camp, this year's was focused on the children of the Holocaust.
"As the years pass by, and the few survivors of those horrors who can tell the story first hand, pass on, it becomes more important than ever that we keep alive the shocking memory of the Holocaust and learn from its consequences," he said.
PA