In 2010, McAleese addressed the LGBT Diversity National Conference in Dublin. She said "The toxic attitudes which were heard in homes, streets, workplaces even in schools and churches caused untold suffering and nothing is surer than the fact that those attitudes can have and will have no place in the Ireland we are building, for they belong in the same toxic waste dump along with sexism, racism, sectarianism and all those other contrary forces which would diminish the innate dignity, freedom and nature of the human person, reduce their life chances and opportunities and consign them to half-lived lives.