The President, Mrs McAleese, has urged loyalists in north Belfast to end their demonstrations against Catholic children attending Holy Cross School.
Mrs McAleese, who had a number of engagements in Northern Ireland yesterday, said that she found the dispute "depressing" and maintained that the pickets on the school were counter-productive from the protesters' viewpoint.
She added that the IRA's decision to start putting arms beyond use had the potential to create a positive transformation in Northern Ireland.
President McAleese was conferred with an honorary doctorate of letters (D.Litt) at the University of Ulster in Coleraine yesteday.
Opening the Royal Irish Academy's annual symposium on modern language studies in Coleraine, she said while the liberating, cultural transformation envisaged in the Belfast Agreement remained an aspiration, the "impoverishing effects of sectarianism" on the lives of many in the North were "only too real".
Later, at a women's network conference in Templepatrick, Mrs McAleese remarked on the under-representation of women in Northern Ireland politics. "The recent election of three women MPs is a huge improvement on no women MPs, but it is, as Lady Sylvia Hermon MP has said, 'a deeply unsatisfactory state of affairs'," she added.
Last night, Mrs McAleese attended the 85th anniversary of the Rossa GAA Club in west Belfast, where she praised the work of the GAA. The Sinn FΘin president, Mr Gerry Adams, was also due to attend.
