In an emotionally charged speech before the Irish Parliament, US President Joe Biden said he had come to his “home” and was given a standing ovation by MPs in attendance.. “I’m at home… I wish I could stay longer,” the US president said.

Biden becomes the fourth president USA who delivered a speech in the Irish Parliament after John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.

“Well mom, you said it would happen,” the 80-year-old US president said at the start of his speech, looking up at the sky after meeting his mother’s distant relatives on Wednesday.

During his speech before Parliament, the US President mentioned the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. Seamus Heaney’s widow, Mary, was in Parliament.

After a short visit to Northern Ireland, where he called on party leaders to work together and form a regional government, Biden crossed the border and found himself on the land of his ancestors (on the maternal side).

Biden’s great-great-grandfather, Owen Finnegan, left County Louth in 1849 to escape the famine and immigrated to the United States.

The President of the United States did not refuse to be photographed with locals who gathered to catch a glimpse of him at various stops during his tour, and he got a taste of Gaelic sports after meeting Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar.

He acknowledged that he was heading towards the end of his political career, saying characteristically: “I am at the end of my career, not at the beginning. All I have – and you can see how old I am – is a bit of wisdom.”

During a meeting with his Irish counterpart, Michael D. Higgins, he joked that he did not want to return to Washington. In 2016 and 2017, Higgins hosted then-U.S. Vice President Joe Biden at his Dublin residence.

In the guest book, he wrote an Irish proverb: “Your feet will take you where your heart is.”

A lover of poetry, the Irish president presented his American counterpart with an album of poems by Patrick Kavanagh, which were read by U2 vocalist Bono, actor Liam Neeson and Higgins himself.

“He is a real Irishman. He is not like other presidents who say they have Irish roots. He really has them,” commented 52-year-old Michael Carr, a resident of the town of Ballina, who is preparing to receive the US president tomorrow Friday.

Source: APE-MPE-Reuters-AFP.