Senator John McCain, who has hopes of running for US president in 2008, promised full legal status for tens of thousands of illegal Irish at a town hall meeting in the Irish neighbourhood of Woodlawn, New York, at the weekend.
To the strain of "We're all part of Jackie's Army", the unlikely anthem of the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform, Mr McCain took the podium before an audience of hundreds of Tricolour and US-flag waving supporters in a neighbourhood that has seen many people return to Ireland because of post 9/11 immigration clampdowns.
While the line "We're all off to Italy" from Ireland's 1990 World Cup song Put 'Em Under Pressure may seem inappropriate for immigrants determined to stay in the US, Mr McCain took it in good spirits, nodding his head in approval as the "Olé, Olé, Olé" chorus kicked in.
Mr McCain, along with Senator Edward Kennedy, is sponsoring the so-called "McCain-Kennedy" immigration reform Bill in the US Senate. This contains provisions for a guest-worker programme and a way for those living in the US illegally to work toward citizenship.
Interviewed on the This Week programme on RTÉ Radio yesterday, he said there was a "very significant" Irish influence on the campaign to grant legal status to illegal immigrants in the US. He said he did not know how long the legislative battle over the issue would take.
Hundreds of people, many of them wearing "Legalize The Irish" T-shirts, crammed into the St Barnabas School's auditorium on the Bronx-Yonkers border for his weekend speech while dozens more listened on speakers set up outside the hall.
To laughter from the audience, the senator repeatedly had to ask bar owner and Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform deputy chairman, Ciarán Staunton, to translate some of the audience questions into American English.
In answer to one question, he said he didn't know why Congressman Peter King, a close ally of Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams, was co-sponsoring a Bill that would make illegal immigration an aggravated felony crime.
To loud applause from the audience, he said Mr King needed a "better education" from the Irish community on the realities of undocumented immigration.
Asked about President Bush's credibility on immigration issues by Irish woman Mags O'Brien from Stanford, Connecticut, Mr McCain said the president had a lot of experience on illegal immigration issues as Governor of Texas and viewed immigration reform positively.
A woman who identified herself only as Siobhán, asked Mr McCain how he felt about a possible presidential run by Congressman Tom Tancredo, who is strongly anti-immigrant.
"Come on in," Mr McCain said, addressing Congressman Tancredo directly, "the water's fine".
On his own possible run for the presidency in 2008, Mr McCain joked that the only members of Congress that were ever ruled out of a presidential run were either incapacitated or in detox.