Glen Hansard Is No Irish Hero

CONTENT WARNING: This piece contains mentions of grooming, child sexual abuse, exploitation and (of course) Conor McGregor. If you don’t feel able to read this right now, please don’t – look after yourself, life is hard enough as it is x

The world has gone mad.

This past week, a 56-year-old singer-songwriter from Dublin died in a 4.30am motorbike accident after a lively seisiún in a Dublin pub – an incident that’s being investigated by gardaí as if there’s a mystery to uncover, which does make me wonder if this is a courtesy afforded to all dead road users – and the outpouring of grief and adulation was almost instantaneous.

Social media was full of posts about his impact on Irish music (he was in a band called The Frames, another called The Swell Season and, perhaps most significantly, won an Oscar for the song Falling Slowly, which featured in the popular 2006 film, Once); the activism he was involved in for Dublin’s homeless community (he organised Dublin’s annual Christmas charity busk in aid of the Dublin Simon Community and was also one of the people who, in 2016, occupied Dublin’s Apollo House in protest at the city’s homeless crisis); the mentorship and support he provided to young (this is significant) singer-songwriters, many of whom were quick to credit him with encouraging, fostering and boosting their profiles.

What social media wasn’t full of, though, was posts about the other side of Glen Hansard: the side that was, I thought, well known, as it was to me, a millennial woman who spent a lot of time in Dublin in my teens and early twenties, going to gigs or nightclubs (or both).

It was the side that meant you just knew, as a woman in your teens, to be wary around him; it was the side that meant you had a friend who had “been with” him when she was far too young (in my then-friend’s case, 15) to have been able to consent to it; it was the side that had him confessing, in a major US publication, to falling in love with a child he had met when she was just 13, and he 31. “I think we fell in love a couple of years ago, but nothing happened until recently,” he said of his Once co-star, Marketa Irglova, in 2007, when she was 19. “I kept telling myself she’s just a kid,” he said of Irglova, whom he had first met at the age of 13.

According to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, “grooming is a process that "involves the offender building a relationship with a child, and sometimes with their wider family, gaining their trust and a position of power over the child, in preparation for abuse.”