A society “scarred by great divisions of power and wealth is not a society in which the human spirit can flourish,” President Michael D Higgins has warned.

“Where there are those who believe that inequality is inevitable, or even beneficial, there is now concrete evidence to the contrary,” he said at a St Patrick’s Day reception in Áras an Uachtaráin.

“Almost everything, from life expectancy, to levels of mental illness, illiteracy and violence in the community – is affected not by how wealthy a society is, but how equal it is,” he said.

Studies proved that “societies with a bigger gap between rich and poor are bad for everyone in them, including the well off...” He said a more equal society was a healthier society judged by almost every indicator.

The protections “of our State must be sufficient to ensure that all citizens have the means to participate, to engage, to shape their world.”

He said while social inequalities and poverty were two great challenges there was a third, the moral and intellectual challenge of resisting an “inclination towards cynicism, fatalism, and lack of imagination that has been one of the sad legacies of our economic boom and subsequent downturn”.

The President said Irish people were in danger of “drifting towards an un-freedom...the transition from the concept of citizenship with implications for interdependence, transcendence of self and solidarity, and indeed justice, to a concept of consumerism which is market driven, individualised, privatised and insatiable of satisfaction”.

We must “recall and cherish that which makes us truly human: our consciousness, our capacity to question, to critique and shape the world in which we live and raise future generations.”

He said the country needed to rebuild a sense of trust and community to provide the foundations of a new economy based on shared common good rather than speculative aspirations for individual aggrandizement.

“A confident and creative people is our aim, a people at ease with itself, a people that know and act consistent with the knowledge that our strength lies in our social solidarity; that together we have limitless possibilities – feidireachtaí gan teorainn,” he said.

Referring to The Irish Times survey published on St Patrick’s Day, which found a majority of Irish emigrants had left voluntarily, he told the Marian Finucane Show on RTÉ Radio that “it means people have made a choice. There are many people who have gone abroad and come back including myself. People will come and go.”