The President has strongly defended both the 1916 Rising and Irish nationalism against those who claim that these are narrow and sectarian components of Irish history.
Mrs McAleese said last night that the source of the accusations that the Rising was an exclusive and sectarian enterprise was probably the "tendency for powerful and pitiless elites to dismiss with damning labels those who oppose them".
However, those who had proclaimed the Rising were "our idealistic and heroic founding fathers and mothers, our Davids to their Goliaths".
The President's remarks, at the opening of a conference in UCC last night on the Rising, mark a further move to bring the 1916 Rising back to a central place in the official establishment view of Irish history.
The Taoiseach's announcement late last year that the traditional 1916 parade past Dublin's GPO is to be reinstated for this year's 90th anniversary, came after over three decades of dispute over how the physical force tradition represented by the Rising should be marked, in the light of the violence in Northern Ireland.
Mr Ahern said then: "The Irish people need to reclaim the spirit of 1916, which is not the property of those who have abused and debased the title of republicanism", a reference to contemporary republican paramilitaries.
The Government Secretariat saw and approved the President's speech in advance, in accord with normal procedure.