Diarmuid Breatnach

(Reading time: 3 mins.)

The death of Glen Hansard, Oscar-winning Irish musician in accident on his motorcycle in the early hours of Wednesday¹ shocked and saddened many, not only in the Irish music community but among campaigners against Dublin homelessness too.

Hansard first gained fame playing Outspan Foster in The Commitments, the 1991 Alan Parker film based on Roddy Doyle’s first novel but developed his career in music, first with The Frames band, then as part of the duo The Swell Season and later as a solo artist.

Hansard, while often traveling to perform around the world, lived in both Kildare and Helsinki, home also of his wife, the poet Maire Saaritsa. Hansard won an Oscar in 2008 for the song Falling Slowly, written with musical partner Markéta Inglová², featured in the John Carney film Once.

The musician was also one of a group of high-profile individuals who occupied the Apollo House building in a protest against homelessness and as a shelter for Dublin’s homeless in December 2016³ (ironically the centenary year of the 1916 Rising against British occupation of Ireland).

In the decade since the Apollo House protest occupation, the number of homeless in Ireland has significantly more than doubled.⁴ Housing is of course part of the property sector in a capitalist society and the current situation benefits speculators, big landlords and financing banks.

The Irish national ruling class serves those finance-capitalist interests and therefore successive governments have made no impact on the problem other than allowing it to grow. Some politicians are themselves landlords as are also a number of Gardaí and ex-Gardaí.

Clearly the Irish ruling class feels no incentive to end the homeless crisis, though it could do so, even without ending its capitalist system. Glen Hansard admitted in an interview with him I recall viewing that he had been somewhat naive in his hopes of the Apollo House occupation.

The obvious solution, restated many times, is to provide universal rented accommodation through the State and municipal authorities. The rents should be affordable, with the spread of the higher ones helping to maintain those lower income or on social welfare.

Rental income over time finances not only maintenance and repairs but also new building. Employment is provided in construction, maintenance and administration. Streets can become cleaner and safer and more attractive. Addiction problems become easier to address.

But that setup, though not destroying the capitalist system, would cut the swag-bag of the unproductive finance and property parasites so the crisis stays and grows. And the alternative Left movement is not threatening the Gombeens’ overthrow so they have no incentive to change.

Many years ago, home in Dublin on holiday from London, someone I was walking and talking with stopped a young red-haired man and they began to chat. I remarked that I had seen the man before — or had we met? Perhaps he thought I was kidding but admitted his role in The Commitments.

He mentioned The Frames also – he was Glen Hansard of course. Naturally I had seen the film in London but never heard of The Frames. As we parted company I felt a kind of disconnect from Dublin but also remarked that I hoped Hansard hadn’t thought I was ‘taking the piss.’

Decades later, as I gathered at rallies outside Apollo House (and sang at one of them) that episode did not intrude on my memory – because it was the homelessness protest upon which I was concentrated and not the famous people fronting it – but it comes to me now.

One of my brothers, Cormac, had a connection with Hansard as in August 2023 the latter requested of Dónal Lunny to play at a friend’s wedding the air of his composition Across the Hill, aired in a Seán Ó Riada Retrospective in 1987. Lunny replied he couldn’t play it but recommended Cormac.

Cormac got a trio together to play the air at the wedding but mislaid his sunglasses when leaving so had to return another day for them and they spent a short time together.

Two years later, in October 2025, Cormac met Hansard again on the occasion of the funeral mass for Manchán Magan, a gathering of many in the fields of Irish language, writing and music.

Back in 2023 when Cormac had returned to Hansard looking for his sunglasses, Hansard gave him a Songbird whistle in low D made by Phil Hardy as a present.‘I can’t play it’,said Glen Hansard.‘You might as well have it.’ Cormac demurred, Glen Hansard insisted.

‘I’ll accept it,’ said Cormac eventually, ‘on condition that I record something for you, gratis, or we get together some day and record playing some music together.’ Hansard laughed. ‘That could happen’, he replied.

But now it can’t. Not on this plane of existence, anyway.

End.

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FOOTNOTES

129^th July 2026.

2 Musical partner in the Swell Season duo.

3https://www.thejournal.ie/apollo-house-homeless-3144658-Dec2016/

4The number of homeless people in Ireland was approximately 6,900 in late 2016 (and around 6,189 in mid-2016), and has risen to a record high of 17,447 people in state-funded emergency accommodation as of May 2026. But there are also people ‘sofa-surfing’, facing eviction or in otherwise insecure accommodation or even sleeping on the street.

SOURCES

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/music/2026/07/29/glen-hansard-dies-in-dublin-motorbike-crash

https://www.thejournal.ie/apollo-house-homeless-3144658-Dec2016