The President, Mrs McAleese, has apologised for comments she made in a radio interview on Thursday morning during which she appeared to compare Northern Ireland Protestants to Nazis.
The President said last night she was "desperately sorry" for the hurt caused. She said it had never been her intention to lay all the blame for Northern Ireland sectarianism at the door of Protestants during her RTÉ Morning Ireland interview.
In Thursday morning's interview, Mrs McAleese said the Nazis had given "to their children an irrational hatred of Jews in the same way that people in Northern Ireland transmitted to their children an irrational hatred, for example, of Catholics, in the same way that people give to their children an outrageous and irrational hatred of those who are of different colour and all of those things".
The remarks provoked criticism from the Democratic Unionist Party, the Ulster Unionist Party and the Orange Order, which yesterday scrapped plans to meet her in March.
Speaking from England last night, the President said: "What I said I undoubtedly said clumsily. I should have finished out the example and it would have been a much better interview had I done that. That was certainly my intention. It was never my intention going into it simply to blame one side of the community in Northern Ireland."
The apology was welcomed and accepted by unionist politicians and the Orange Order last night.
A spokesman for the Orange Order said it was "delighted she has apologies for her deeply unfortunate remarks made on Thursday".
Mr Michael McGimpsey, a former minister in the Executive, said: "This puts the matter to rest - the sooner we forget about it and get on with what needs to be done the better."
DUP Assembly member Ms Arlene Foster said it might take time to heal the hurt caused by Mrs McAleese's comments but added: "I'm happy she has apologised,"
The scale of the controversy appears to have been misjudged by the President and her advisers, who believed up to yesterday afternoon that it would run its course. Having decided that a public apology would have to be made, the President decided to do a number of radio interviews this morning. It was decided that this was not fast enough and interviews were arranged at short notice between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. last night.
During an interview on Today FM, Mrs McAleese accepted that the Orange Order had fairly criticised her failure to include both Catholics and Protestants. "That is what I should have done if my head had been screwed on properly and clearly I made a mistake for which I am desperately sorry," she said.
Speaking on RTÉ's Five Seven Live, she said she had tried to do much over the years "to try and show in every way that I can that we all have blame" for the sectarianism which exists.
Mrs McAleese is scheduled to hold another series of visits to Northern Ireland late next month, accompanied by her husband.
She went on: "I certainly hope that nothing that I have said will stop the march of peace and the march towards a culture of mutual respect. I was trying to encourage that culture of mutual respect."
She said she had been trying during her radio interview to push the message that intolerance and racism has to be fought in every generation.
"In trying to say that, I came across as putting the blame on one side of the community. That was entirely wrong. Having rectified that now, I hope as sincerely as I can, because I am so devastated because good people that I know that I really would not want in any shape or form to hurt - I am sure they were hurt by those words. I would want to take back that hurt... I did not intend to inflict on one side of the community the entire burden of responsibility, or blame."
She added: "Sectarianism is a shared problem. It is my fault for not saying that absolutely as clearly as I always do 110 times out of 111. This was 111 unfortunately."