Remembering Glen Hansard: Last tango in Dublin
Earlier this week, on Tuesday, Academy Award-winning Irish folk musician Glen Hansard walked into Wren’s Nest, a Dublin pub, with his guitar, and sang a piece about the end of a relationship. “Time is the only thing that’s gonna fix this now,” he crooned. It was a snippet from an unreleased number sung in the kind of room in which Hansard had almost always felt at home. Hours later, he was killed in a motorcycle crash. He was 56. It is a poignant final image, with Hansard spending his last evening doing what he loved best: Singing amid fellow Dubliners in a neighbourhood pub. Born and raised in the Irish capital, he spent his childhood amid hardship in Ballymun in northern Dublin. This city was also his first music school, where Hansard began busking as a teenager after leaving school at 13; it was on these streets that he first learned the unpredictability of a public performance. Years later, in 1990, he would find his artistic identity with the rock band, The Frames. What took Hansard from being a popular musician in Dublin to one striding the world stage was John Carney’s intimate, low-budgetmusical drama, Once (2007), where Hansard starred alongside fellow musician Markéta Irglová as two struggling Dublin musicians falling in love through music. The film’s centrepiece, ‘Falling Slowly’, won Hansard an Academy Award for Best Original Song, which Irglová shared with him. After a lifetime of performing music all over the world, Hansard would return to Grafton Street everyChristmaseve without fail to sing for the home crowd. In a Dublin pub, his last outing, he did the same: Connecting people from diverse worlds with music. His tragic loss will linger. Time, after all, may not fix this now.
- 1Ireland's Arts Council, established under the Arts Act of 1951 and later revised in 2003, exemplifies a governance model in which the state formally invests in cultural infrastructure and public performance spaces of the kind where Hansard began his career. Dublin City Council's own busking bye-laws, introduced in 2015 after public debate, regulate exactly the kind of street performance culture on Grafton Street that shaped Hansard's early years. This shows how local governance frameworks can either nurture or constrain grassroots artistic careers.
- 2Ireland has long used its musicians, from U2 to Hansard, as instruments of cultural diplomacy, with the state agency Culture Ireland funding international tours and festival appearances to project Irish soft power abroad. Hansard's Academy Award win for 'Falling Slowly' in 2008 became a notable moment of this cultural diplomacy, amplifying Ireland's global image well beyond its population of roughly five million. Such soft-power projection through the arts parallels how other small states leverage cultural exports to punch above their diplomatic weight.
- 3Musical works like 'Falling Slowly' are protected under copyright law, in Ireland under the Copyright and Related Rights Act, 2000, granting creators exclusive rights over reproduction and public performance for life plus seventy years. Separately, Ireland's Artists' Exemption scheme, in place since 1969 under Finance Act provisions, exempts qualifying creative income from income tax, a deliberate policy choice to support musicians like Hansard financially. Together these legal frameworks shaped the economic environment in which he built a decades-long career from busking to global stardom.
- 4Ireland's music and creative industries contribute over one billion euros annually to its economy and support tens of thousands of jobs, underscoring the economic weight behind stories like Hansard's rise from busker to Academy Award winner. 'Once,' made on a reported budget of under 150,000 euros, went on to earn over 20 million dollars worldwide and later became a Tony Award-winning Broadway musical, showing the outsized returns low-budget creative works can generate. His death at 56 also adds to public health data showing motorcyclists face far higher fatality rates per mile travelled than car occupants.