In an emotionally charged speech to the Irish Parliament, US President Joe Biden said he had come to his “home” and was warmly applauded by the MPs present. “I’m at home … I wish I could stay longer,” the US president said.

Biden became the fourth US president to address the Irish parliament, following 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 skyward after meeting some of his mother’s distant relatives on Wednesday.

During his speech to parliament, the US president referred to the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who in 1995 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Present in parliament was Seamus Heaney’s widow, Mary.

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

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

The US president did not refuse to be photographed with locals who gathered to catch a glimpse of him at various stops on his tour, while he got a taste of Gaelic sports after meeting Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar.

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

During his 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 the then US Vice President Joe Biden at his residence in Dublin.

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 recited by U2 singer Bono, actor Liam Neeson and Higgins himself.

“He’s 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, which is preparing to host the US president tomorrow Friday.