He was born in Ballymun, the second of six children. His
father, a carpenter and fiddle player, belonged to a generation for whom music
was not a profession but a thread woven through labour and family life.
Ballymun itself was built as a promise of modern housing for working people,
then became a symbol of neglect. Hansard’s first musical work was on the
street. As a teenager, he busked, guitar in hand, learning how to hold a crowd
not through amplification or staging but through presence.
The busker is a striking figure for Marxists: a worker who
sells his labour directly, without wage or boss, relying on the goodwill of
strangers. It is precarious, exposed, and yet marked by a rare autonomy.
Hansard carried that sensibility with him for the rest of his life. Fans often
spoke of the absence of distance between him and the audience, a performer who
seemed to dissolve the usual boundary between stage and floor.
His first wage‑labour in the culture industry came early,
with The Commitments (1991), where he played Outspan Foster. The film’s
celebration of working‑class Dublin claiming soul music mirrored something in
Hansard himself: a belief that music belonged to those who needed it, not those
who owned it. In 1990, he co‑founded The Frames, and for years his career was
built on the road and in the live room. These were spaces where the
relationship between performer and audience remained stubbornly human,
resistant to being flattened into product.
Once: A Small Film About the Kindness of Strangers
Then came Once. Made on a shoestring, it became a
global phenomenon, and “Falling Slowly” won the 2008 Oscar. The ceremony
revealed the culture industry’s priorities: Markéta Irglová’s acceptance speech
was cut short by the orchestra, restored only after a commercial break.
Hansard’s own message that night was simple: make art, keep going. Yet the
film’s success also turned his relationship with Irglová into marketing and
touring material. Under capitalism, even intimacy becomes something you can
package, promote, and sell.
When Once appeared in 2007, it looked like nothing
much: a film made for almost no money, shot on borrowed locations, carried by
two musicians who were not actors in any conventional sense. Yet it became one
of the most quietly beloved Irish films of its generation, not because it aimed
high but because it stayed close to the ground, to the street, to the
shopfront, to the fragile hope that strangers might help one another for no
reason other than recognition.
Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová play characters who barely
have names, and that anonymity is part of the film’s truth. They are two people
trying to keep going in a city that offers them little. He is a busker and
repair-shop worker; she is a young immigrant holding her family together. Their
connection is not romantic in the Hollywood sense. It is something smaller and
more human: two people who meet at the right moment and give each other just
enough encouragement to continue.
The film’s songs, written long before the script, become the
emotional architecture. “Falling Slowly” is not a declaration but a plea, and
the way the song grows in the cramped music shop is the film’s whole argument:
that art made without permission or polish can still carry enormous weight. The
recording studio scenes, with their awkwardness and sudden beauty, show
collaboration as a kind of temporary shelter.
Once is often described as a fairy tale, but its
magic is modest. It believes that people can help one another without owning
one another, that creativity can bloom in the cracks of economic hardship, and
that intimacy does not need to be consummated to matter. Its ending is gentle,
unresolved, and honest.
What remains, years later, is the film’s sense of grace. It
is a story about two musicians who meet briefly and change each other’s lives
in ways neither fully understands. It also reminds us that some of the most
enduring Irish art has been made not in studios or boardrooms but in borrowed
rooms, on street corners, and in the fleeting kindness between strangers.
His most visible public act of kindness and solidarity was
the annual Christmas Eve busk outside the Gaiety Theatre for the Simon
Community. It was sincere, generous, and it raised real money. It also
illuminated a contradiction that belongs to the times rather than to the man.
In a city where housing has become a mechanism for extracting rent, the duty to
shelter the vulnerable has been handed to musicians and charity collections.
The busk eased the hardship of homelessness; it could not touch the structures
that produce it.
What Hansard seemed to cherish most lay entirely outside the
market. The pub session musicians gathered around a table, playing for no fee
and no applause, is a kind of commons, a reminder of what culture looks like
when it is shared rather than sold. It is fitting that hundreds of singers and
buskers gathered near the Gaiety to sing for him after his death, before a
public wake and a funeral at St Patrick’s Cathedral. The crowd on the street
was solidarity. The cathedral was the establishment paying its respects.
Hansard leaves behind songs that will be streamed, licensed
and monetised long after him, mostly for the benefit of those who own the
catalogue rather than those who made it. But he also leaves something harder to
quantify: the memory of a working‑class Dubliner who kept returning to the
street and the session, to rooms where music was made together, freely, without
an invoice.
