Dr McAleese told the Irish Independent she was “disturbed to hear that [the troops] are running short of supplies and rations”, a development she said was “appalling”.
However, she also underlined that the Irish troops have been in the region a long time and, “really know what they are doing”.
“On the other hand, do any of us know what tomorrow is going to bring? It is the voices of fear and hatred that, unfortunately, are making all the running, and it is ugliness and hatred that are raining down,” she said.
The 73-year-old said she visited Camp Shamrock in Lebanon twice while in office.
“I was the first president to visit our troops abroad. I always had a great affection for the troops because I had a brother who was in the Air Corps. So the first visit I made out of Ireland after I was elected in 1997 was to Camp Shamrock and it was the last visit I made out of Ireland when I left office in 2011,” she said.
She expressed concern over some good friends in Lebanon about whom she has no information.
“I don’t know if they are in their home or are out of their home or have they joined the tens of hundreds of thousands who are sleeping in their cars,” she said.
She highlighted that the conflict in the Middle East, like that in Ukraine, was just one of the reasons for people suddenly ending up homeless.
She was speaking after she made a presentation to Focus Ireland’s first-ever Lived Experience Ambassadors who spent the past year raising awareness and advocating for the 14,486 people affected by homelessness in Ireland.
Dr McAleese told the outgoing and incoming ambassadors that her own family had experienced two years of homelessness after their home was machine-gunned when she was 19, causing her parents and the nine children to flee with just the clothes they were wearing.
“Fifty-five years ago in Belfast there were hundreds if not thousands who were rendered homeless by hatred and the eruption of violence; the misery of it,” she said.
“It took us a couple of years to get a home of our own again – two years of worry and instability.”
She paid tribute to Sr Stan Kennedy who founded Focus Ireland, which will turn 40 next year.
One of the inaugural five members of the Lived Experience Ambassadors Programme (LEAP), Paul Geoghegan from Ballymun, told the Irish Independent, he had fallen into homelessness as a result of addiction.
However, a near death situation led him to treatment and detoxing while Focus Ireland helped him get a home.
“That gave me structure and allowed me to bond again with my family,” the 52-year-old social care worker said.
