MARY McAleese has said the violence and upheaval of the Troubles may not have been as severe had there been greater collaboration between the British and Irish governments in the 1960s.
The former Irish president was speaking in London on Wednesday night in a speech which focused on diplomatic relations between Ireland and Britain over the past century.
Acknowledging the fraught relationship between the two countries in the past, she said relations had been transformed over the course of 100 years.
"Irish-British relations in 1916 and Irish-British relations in 2016 belong to two different worlds," she said.
Mrs McAleese's address covered the Easter Rising, the Troubles and improving Anglo-Irish relations which culminated in Queen Elizabeth's visit to the Republic in 2011.
Speaking to a audience of cross-party MPs, including several former Northern Ireland secretaries, the former president said that at the dawn of the Troubles the British government took a "hands off approach" to the north and adopted the view that what happened in the region was an internal matter.
She said this resulted in the exclusion of the Irish government from "offering any useful input or insight in affairs north of the border".
"We whose lives were so deeply affected by events there, are probably entitled to ask what might have happened if the British government had listened more attentively to my predecessor Patrick Hillery when on August 1, 1969 as Ireland's foreign minister he came to this city to plead with his UK counterpart, Michael Stewart, that Derry city was 'a powder keg' that needed very sensitive handling," Mrs McAleese said.
She placed the 1916 rising in the context of wider geopolitical issues and said it was one of the first rebellions against an imperial power at a time when "the day of Empires was coming to a close".
