An emotional Joe Biden was moved to tears after meeting a priest in Ireland who gave his son Beau the last rites

• President Biden was moved to tears after meeting the priest who gave his late son the last rites.
• The meeting during Biden's trip to Ireland was spontaneous and "delightful," the priest said.

President Joe Biden was moved to tears on Friday during his trip to Ireland after he learned a priest at a Catholic shrine he was visiting had performed the last rites for his son, who died in 2015.

The chance meeting with Father Frank O'Grady surprised the president, who later said: "It was incredible to see him. It seemed like a sign," according to the Associated Press.

The priest who accompanied Biden on a tour of the Knock Shrine pilgrimage site said the reunion brought the president to tears.

"He was crying, it really affected him, and then we said a prayer, said a decade of the rosary for his family," the priest Richard Gibbons told BBC Ulster radio.

"He lit a candle, and then he took a moment or two of private for prayer."

Gibbons had discovered earlier in the day that O'Grady, one of his colleagues working at the site, was the same priest who had performed the last rites for Biden's late son Beau.

O'Grady was previously assigned to work at a hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, where Beau died of brain cancer in 2015 aged 46.

Beau Biden a decorated soldier who fought in Iraq, died at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

"I told the president that," Gibbons told BBC Ulster. "He wanted to meet him straightaway, so he dispatched a Secret Service agent to go and find him."

It was "a wonderful, spontaneous thing that happened," he said.

The last rites are a Catholic ceremony of final prayers that prepare a person for death. Biden is well-known to have strong Catholic faith and has deep ties to his Irish heritage.

O'Grady called the brief 10-minute reunion with the president "delightful," adding he was "very surprised" when he got "a phone call to say the president wanted to see me," according to the BBC.

During the trip with his son Hunter and sister Valerie, Biden touched the remaining part of the stone wall of Knock Shrine. According to the Catholic faith, Mary, St. Joseph, and St. John, the Evangelist, appeared there in 1879.

Biden later visited a hospice in County Mayo, where a plaque at the entrance of the building is dedicated to his late son.

The president has been warmly greeted on his four-day tour of Ireland over the past few days. On Friday, Biden drew large crowds in Ballina, saying in a speech, "Over the years, stories of this place have become part of my soul."