The sight of Irish people, so long used to being demonised and hurtfully labelled, doing the same to refugees and travellers was "particularly, tragically unedifying", the President, Mrs McAleese, has said.
Addressing a human rights education conference in Dublin, she noted how easily Irish people succumbed to the temptation to demonise and stereotype, "so that when a refugee or traveller gets into trouble it is so easy to say all travellers, all refugees are troublemakers".
"Breeding prejudice is a bit like fattening pigeons", she said, "the more we feed them the more we encourage them to stay".
There were people who had "garnered to themselves a dangerously smug superiority, whether it's of race, religion, class, language, accent, gender or generation, which erodes the humanity of the other and can have very devastating downstream consequences for individuals and communities." In Ireland, as in the former Yugoslavia, there were "cliques and mobs. Looking at some of the more recent reactions to the influx of foreign nationals to Ireland - some in very dire circumstances, some running from very tragic home backgrounds, others attracted by our recent economic good fortune - it is very easy to see how we too can descend so easily to that lowest common denominator of intolerance and hatred."
The President also said Irish educators sometimes needed to be "subversive" of what children were taught at home in order "to instill the principles of respect and mutual tolerance" in them.
Professional educators were often called to be a "redemptive force in little lives and little psyches that are already well twisted, well skewed by the time they ever come into school - skewed and forced into hatred by that place which is the surprising crucible of hatred, the home.
"It is extraordinary how even the most loving and kindly and good of parents can also become the prime educators of their children in the ways of hate. Irish educators have to be acutely aware of the need to instill the principles of respect and mutual tolerance in our children."
The President said Northern Ireland was the most "blindingly visible example" of a place where people who had lived as neighbours became polarised into groups which "can transform into raging furnaces of hatred ignited by suspicion, elitism and sectarianism".
Quoting the poet John Hewitt's phrase about the North's people never having been "checked in ways of hate", she said this phrase was "a telling reproof" to all educators. "Who is it who takes responsibility for checking the ways of hatred? Who stands in the path of hatred and blocks its way?" she asked.
President McAleese said the "real challenge" for Irish educators was "to hand on the baton of love for our own history and culture without at the same time handing on the baton of contempt for the history and culture of others. One of the best ways of doing that is to draw into the equation education in broad human rights."
The keynote address at the conference, which was jointly organised by Amnesty International, Trocaire and the City of Dublin VEC, was given by a Cork teacher and expert on "multiple intelligences", Ms Anne Fleischmann.
She said the new Leaving Certificate Applied sought to be "a multiple intelligence programme which would develop a broad range of human ability" beyond the traditional logical and linguistic abilities measured by academic exams.
However, too often the perception of LCA was that it was a "weak corner for weak kids" who would not do well in the traditional Leaving Certificate exam. In fact, the kind of "broad giftedness" encouraged by the LCA programme was highly prized by professions such as nursing and business.