Glen Hansard died after a single-vehicle motorcycle crash in Dublin before 4.30am on Wednesday, ending a life that had just hours earlier included a song at The Wren’s Nest pub. The 56-year-old musician was treated at the scene, then pronounced dead a short time later.
Lower Road before 4.30am
The crash happened on Lower Road between Tinkers Hill and Rugged Lane, in the Strawberry Beds area of Lucan. Garda said the motorcyclist, a man in his 50s, was treated at the scene but was pronounced deceased a short time later, and the emergency services were alerted just before 4.30am.
Hansard had spent time in The Wren’s Nest on Lower Road on Tuesday night, and a video of him performing a song was filmed there that night. The session had been advertised as a celebration of the Mayo footballers’ victory in Sunday’s All-Ireland final, tying the pub scene to a night that ended with a fatal crash 2-3km away.
The Wren’s Nest account
On Thursday, The Wren’s Nest told RTÉ News that Hansard left after closing time and departed eastwards. The pub also said it closed at the normal licensed trading hours and that there was no after-hours trading or “lock-in”.
That detail matters because the sequence now sits on a tight timeline: music in the pub on Tuesday night, departure after closing time, and the crash in the early hours of Wednesday. A Garda inquiry will still be carried out to help determine the cause of the crash and prepare a file for a coroner’s inquest, even though no other road users appear to have been involved.
Garda inquiry and inquest
A postmortem will be conducted on the remains of the deceased, with toxicology testing as part of that process. Examinations and inquiries will be gathered for evidence at the inquest, which is the stage that should bring the first official account of how the crash unfolded.
For readers, the practical point is simple: the death has already triggered the formal process that can identify cause, sequence, and evidence, but not all of those answers arrive at once. The immediate next step is the Garda file, and the first hard findings will come through the postmortem and inquest rather than from speculation about the road itself.
