Glen Hansard and The Busk: the Christmas Eve tradition caught on film

Glen Hansard died on 29 July 2026 after a motorcycle crash near the Strawberry Beds in Chapelizod. He was 56, and he leaves his wife Maire and their son Christy.

The obituaries have covered what you would expect. The Oscar for Falling Slowly at the 2008 ceremony. The Frames, formed in 1990 and named after his thing for bicycles. Outspan Foster in The Commitments. The Swell Season records with Markéta Irglová. Presenting the first series of Other Voices back in 2002. The busking on Grafton Street as a teenager who had dropped out of school at thirteen to do it.

All accurate. But ask anyone who has lived in Dublin through the last fifteen years what they associate with him, and a fair number will not say any of that. They will say Christmas Eve.

A session that got out of hand

The first official Christmas Eve Busk happened in 2010. It was not planned as an institution. It was musicians standing on Grafton Street with a bucket, playing for people who were doing their last panicked shopping, raising money for the Dublin Simon Community.

Then it kept happening, and it got bigger in the way these things do when one person refuses to let them die. Dublin Simon puts the total raised across the run at more than €2 million. The charity covers Dublin, Wicklow, Kildare, Meath, Louth, Cavan and Monaghan, so that money did not stay inside the M50.

What it never lost was the amateur bit at the centre of it. In 2014, with a crowd big enough to bring the street to a standstill, Hansard was still working the audience with a red Santa hat, telling them fifty pence would do if that was what they had.

Who actually turned up

The line-up changed every year, which was part of the appeal. Nobody published a bill in advance and nobody was contractually obliged to be there.

In 2012 Bono and Sinéad O’Connor turned up unannounced and startled the shoppers, that year splitting the takings between Simon and the Peter McVerry Trust. The 2014 busk brought Damien Rice, Mundy, Paddy Casey, Liam Ó Maonlaí, Declan O’Rourke, Danny O’Reilly of The Coronas and Danny O’Donoghue of The Script, while half of Dublin spent the evening on Twitter asking where Bono had got to.

He came back in 2015, joining Hozier for Take Me to Church in front of a crowd that also got Kodaline, The Script and The Coronas. In 2016 the busk ran a few weeks after the Apollo House occupation, which Hansard had helped organise through Home Sweet Home alongside Christy Moore, Hozier, Damien Dempsey, Liam Ó Maonlaí, Jim Sheridan, Saoirse Ronan, John Connors and members of Kodaline. The busk that year was not a neutral Christmas singsong and nobody pretended otherwise.

Later years brought Bono back with The Edge for their first performance together since 2015, doing O Holy Night and then Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) with everyone else piling in. Damien Rice played a slowed-down Creep. Luke Clerkin, Róisín O, Mundy and Imelda May were on that same bill. Across the run the list also takes in Shane MacGowan, Dermot Kennedy, Gavin James, Lisa Hannigan, David Keenan, Loah, Shobsy, The Riptide Movement and The Pale, with Fairytale of New York closing things most years.

The busk came back outside the Gaiety Theatre in December 2022 after a two year gap. Dermot Kennedy, Gavin James, Róisín O, The Coronas, Liam Ó Maonlaí, The Pale and Loah played for over two hours and the rain held off for all of it. Loah sang Joni Mitchell’s River and dedicated Thin Lizzy’s Dancing in the Moonlight to people sleeping rough. Two Ukrainian singers, Ana and Alex, joined Hansard for Take Heart and followed it with a Ukrainian carol. He used the microphone that night to say people should stop treating homelessness and asylum as competing problems. The finale was everyone at once on Forever Young, Little Drummer Boy and The Auld Triangle.

By 2024 it had grown enough to need two slots, a set outside the Gaiety at five and then Grafton Street at eight, with Shobsy alongside Hansard.

I was at the fifteenth anniversary edition in December 2025, standing in the crowd outside the Gaiety with everyone else. It ran to more than thirty acts, which is why most of the coverage the next morning only bothered with the famous ones. Allie Sherlock played, which the wire reports left out. So did The Riptide Movement and Shobsy, and Danny O’Donoghue and Danny O’Reilly came on together. Bono arrived near the end, spent a few seconds fighting a microphone that had decided to stop working, then did Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) with Imelda May. The night closed on Fairytale of New York, with May wishing Shane MacGowan a happy birthday for the following day. People were watching the stream in Berlin, London and New York.

Nobody standing there thought it was the last one.

The detail from all those years that has stuck with me is not a celebrity one. One Christmas Eve, Hansard stood back and played guitar while a man called Philip, who was staying in a Dublin hostel and being supported by Simon, sang George Michael’s Faith to several thousand people on Grafton Street. That was the actual shape of the thing. The famous names were there to draw a crowd, and then the crowd got handed to someone else.

Bono, in his tribute last week, called him a mischievous archangel from Ballymun with no airs and plenty of graces. The music writer BP Fallon said that organising those singsongs would have been enough on its own. Lisa Hannigan said she was bereft, and wrote about seeing The Frames at Vicar Street at eighteen without knowing a single song.

The two years there was no street

Then Covid, and the part of this story that has been almost entirely skipped in the coverage of the last week.

In 2020 the busk could not happen on Grafton Street. Instead of writing the year off, the musicians made something else. The Busk: A Decade on Grafton Street went out on RTÉ One in the run-up to Christmas, built from interviews, new performances and ten years of archive footage, with docu-style material on what the homelessness crisis in Dublin actually looked like at street level. Dermot Kennedy sang Raglan Road. Irish Women in Harmony did Hallelujah. Lisa Hannigan, David Keenan, Róisín O and Mundy were in it, and the spoken word poet Natalya O’Flaherty opened and closed the programme. A Late Late Show special ran the week before. Between them, that Christmas brought in around €1.5 million.

2021 was worse. The permit for the Grafton Street busk was revoked with twelve days to go until Christmas Eve, and Dublin Simon was facing a hole in its fundraising it had no obvious way to fill.

The rescue job fell to Collective Films, a video production company in Dublin, known mainly through their documentary and commercial work rather than by name. Their director Mark Logan took the call and had under a fortnight to build a replacement from nothing. What they produced was a ninety minute live music film recorded in St Patrick’s Cathedral, streamed free at 9pm on Christmas Eve across Dublin Simon’s channels, with Hansard, Bono, Damien Rice, Lisa O’Neill, Cormac Begley and Liam Ó Maonlaí among the performers.

It raised €1.3 million. Twelve days of work.

Logan was blunt at the time about why he did it. He said homelessness in Ireland sits inside a structural class problem that the country has decided to tolerate, and that the number of people sleeping on Irish streets was not something he was prepared to accept. That is not the register production companies usually speak in about a client project.

They recorded the cathedral performances properly rather than just capturing them, and the following year Collective and Dublin Simon released The Busk Record, a vinyl pressing of selected songs from that night, sold to raise more money again.

Why the filmed version matters more now than it did then

For most of its run the busk was a live event and nothing else. It existed in the memory of whoever stood on Grafton Street that evening, and in a few thousand vertical phone clips with the wind battering the microphone.

Two years of it exist properly, on film, shot by people who knew what they were doing, because a pandemic forced the issue. That was an accident of circumstance in 2020 and 2021. It is not an accident now. Anyone who wants to see Glen Hansard running that thing, and who was not physically on Grafton Street to see it, has those recordings and the record and not much else.

There is a lesson buried in that for anyone who organises something recurring and assumes it will keep recurring. Nobody films the ordinary version. Everybody wishes they had.

What happens to Christmas Eve

Dublin Simon said last week that the busk would not have become what it did without Hansard driving it, which is both a tribute and a fairly clear statement of the problem. They also called him a giant in the fight against homelessness, and their statement made the point that his attention was always on the individual people they work with rather than on the event.

Whether the busk happens this December, and in what form, has not been decided publicly. There is no shortage of people on that fifteen year guest list who could stand at the top of Grafton Street and start it off. Whether anyone wants to is a different question, and it is too early to be asking it out loud.

The donation page at simonbusk.ie is still live. As of October 2025, Dublin Simon recorded more than 12,000 people homeless in the Dublin region alone, which is a long way from 2010, when a few musicians led by Glen Hansard stood on a wet street with guitars and a bucket and started all this.