The Cootehill Affair

May God bless the memory of Glen Hansard – Husband, father, and musician

I’ve been avoiding Substack for months, after trying to push out a number of incomplete thoughts as if they were complete. Original writing in the age of AI is more difficult and taxing than it used to be!

But the tragic news of musician Glen Hansard’s passing has brute-forced me through my writer’s block.

I was moved immensely when I first saw Once in theaters. It remains one of my favorite movies, if not my favorite of all time — so raw and authentic and soulful, all from Glen’s own raw, soulful authenticity.

I’m not usually all that moved by celebrity deaths. But at the end of an already grace-filled pilgrimage to Ireland in 2017 — right after converting to Catholicism — I wound up in a pub in County Cavan at four in the morning, passing a guitar around a booth with Glen Hansard, bombing a song in front of him, and then gifting him a rosary out on the street as the bar closed. So this one felt personal.

I didn’t go to Ireland to see Hansard. I went to walk the Pilgrim Paths. But I got much more than I bargained for. And to tell the story of how I met Glen, I have to tell at least a short version of the pilgrimage that enabled it. I first wrote about this trip back in November of 2017 (We Make the Road by Walking on the Road), but I omitted any mention of the remarkable last chapter involving Hansard. It now feels like the right time to finish telling the story.

“Lead me to the towering rock that is higher than I… The LORD is a shelter & refuge for us to hide under.” — Psalm 61

I booked my flight to Dublin on August 13th. Two days later, on the Feast of the Assumption (and, less notably, my 28th birthday) I was on my way to the Emerald Isle.

The Pilgrim Paths are Ireland’s response to the Camino de Santiago, and that year, for Irish heritage week, the five most prominent were offered with guides and groups: St. Finbarr’s Way, Cnoc na dTobar, Cosán na Naomh, St. Kevin’s Way, and Tochar Padraig.

By grace, I managed to walk all five over the course of 10 days or so.

I only found out about the concert after arriving in the country, talking to a fellow traveler in line at customs. It just happened that one of my favorite musicians was playing the last night of an arts festival — in a circus tent on the high school soccer pitch at St Aidan’s Comprehensive, in a remote County Cavan town called Cootehill.

The concert was scheduled for the night before my return flight to San Francisco from Dublin. And even though I had no idea how I would get there, or back in time for my flight, I bought my ticket right away, trusting that God would provide.

Help arrived at every stage, and never once because I had arranged it. The first walk was led by a local pastor, farmer, and in-keeper named David Ross, who was generous with his time and his talents. It was blackberry season, and the vines grew in dense clusters between the rocks of the old farm walls. Before lunch on my first day of walking, I had filled up on berries. That night, Ross prepared a makeshift bed for me on the floor of the dining hall because I had neglected to book a room and his inn was already at full capacity.

I then continued from County Kerry to Dingle — famous for its Dingle Gin — but not before picking up a couple of hitchhikers along the way. The first was an old Irish man who looked like he’d fallen on hard times; he helped me navigate about halfway, and just as soon as I dropped him off at his favorite pub, I met Michele, the Italian merry man, who was also in need of a ride, but didn’t know where he was going. Michele ended up as my traveling companion for the next several days. We hiked the scenic and Christ-haunted Cosán na Naomh, and he taught me how to say the rosary in Italian.

Ave Maria, piena di grazia, il signore è con te. Sei benedetta tra le donne e benedetto è il frutto del seno tuo Jesu.

Santa Maria madre di Dio, prega per noi peccatori, adesso e nell’ora della nostra morte.

The day after the hike, Michele needed to get back to Dublin to make it to Italy in time for his sister’s wedding. Conveniently, the fourth path was just outside of Dublin too, set to begin in two days. So we drove east together, and once I’d dropped him in the city I returned my rental car and took off to complete the final two hikes on foot and by public transportation.

Ditching the rental car was a bit of an act of faith itself (though it felt safer than continuing to risk a crash, driving on the wrong side of the road). I almost missed the bus for the fourth path — St. Kevin’s Way — in Glendalough. I walked straight past the road to the visitor’s center and continued a solid half mile before realizing my error. I had to run back — but the mistake had allowed me to pray at one of the oldest church ruins in Ireland, and to take a small fern for my flower press.

Some lore says St. Kevin once threw a seductress in a lake to avoid falling to temptation. But the favored story, considering that he’s remembered as a saint and not an assailant, is that he threw himself into a thicket — perhaps a blackberry bush — and rolled around without any clothing. In any event, a very specific prayer of mine — addressed to St. Kevin — was answered, and I have continued to ask his intercession.

Getting to the final path, in County Mayo, looked like it was going to require much time and treasure. But some other new friends — an older couple who also happened to be from Berkeley — offered me a ride in their rental car. I had met them on the first day, when Dennis and I both noticed that the other was wearing UC Berkeley apparel (he a hat, me a shirt).

Dennis had been planning to go golfing rather than finish the last path, but the intercession of St. Patrick compelled him to throw caution to the wind and embark on the strenuous 35 km hike, which ends with a trek up and over Croagh Patrick. By the end we were bitten by bugs, battered, and bruised. I was sustained through it all by the Mass, celebrated outdoors on a rock where St. Patrick is said to have prepared the Eucharist. Before Patrick, that same rock had been used for Druidic sacrifices. What kind of sacrifices, I know not.

I found so much help along the way that I felt pushed to put my trust all the more fully in God, who wants so badly to give us good things.

The morning after hiking Croagh Patrick I overslept, and nearly missed the only Sunday bus that would get me to the concert in time. By another series of small miracles, I hitched a ride into town with some girls who were staying at the same Airbnb as me, caught that bus with moments to spare, made the connecting bus in Dublin, and reached the town of Cootehill with time to explore. There were no hostels or inns, but I figured I could post up at the police station overnight as a last resort.

“Have you met Glen yet?”

Hansard’s raw, authentic busker’s energy was on display on stage that night, as he poured out his entire heart and soul into every song. His acoustic guitar bore the scars of his strumming, which he played so violently you thought the strings would break.

After the show, I wandered around the pitch as people made their way to their cars, not knowing where in this tiny hamlet I would find a place to sleep, let alone how I would get back to the airport in time for my morning flight.

One of the locals asked me where I was from and I told him San Francisco. We got to talking about my pilgrimage, and how I had walked five hiking paths first travelled by legendary Irish saints, and how I had nearly slept through the bus that brought me here.

“Great story! Have you met Glen yet?” my new friend, Eoin, asked.

“Huh? Oh, uh… no!” I stammered.

“Come with me!”

He took me over to a concessions tent where Glen was drinking a beer and chatting with friends and fans. Eoin, it turned out, was part of Footsbarn, the tight-knit travelling theatre troupe whose 400-seat big top the whole festival was built around, and which they had pitched there for the week. They had adopted Glen into their merry band, and they were old friends.

He introduced me and told Glen about my pilgrimage — how I’d come from San Francisco only to discover that I would get to see my favorite musician as the cherry on top of a thoroughly blessed visit to the Emerald Isle.

Glen was kind and attentive. I couldn’t believe I was meeting my idol. I can’t remember if I told him how much his work had moved me, but I did comment on the one song from his newest repertoire that spoke to me on the deepest level: “Her Mercy” — a beautiful ballad about starting over and receiving forgiveness from the Blessed Mother. While he seemed not to be a practicing Catholic, there could be no doubt about his influences growing up in Catholic Ireland.

The conversation ended, and I went back to wandering the pitch.

Eoin found me again and asked what I was doing for the rest of the night. It was already late, and I told him I was going to try to find a safe nook to sleep until I could catch a bus to the airport the next morning.

In another minor miracle, he told me that his brother was heading to the airport early the next morning, and invited me to come out drinking at a local pub with the gang.

In Ireland, the pubs have a tradition of kicking out the strangers at closing time while simultaneously opening up the back doors to the regulars, who shuffle out the front door only to return a few minutes later for another several rounds of Guinness.

Coming in through the back door with my new friend, I should not have been surprised to see that Glen had already made himself comfortable in a long booth, surrounded by friends.

I was given a chair, and got another once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be a fly on the wall while they passed a guitar around and sang folk songs.

After a few hours, the guitar came to me…

Now note: I do not really play the guitar. I’ve dabbled in stringed instruments — mostly banjo — but know only enough to be dangerous. I thought I might be able to muster a decent performance of one of my “originals.”

Hah!

Between the nerves, the fatigue, and the several Guinnesses I’d already downed… I bombed — hard. It would have been humiliating, had Hansard not somehow maneuvered the situation in a way that allowed me to slide it off. By the next round of Guinness, the gaffe was forgotten.

It was now close to 4 a.m. and the bar was closing for real. We made our way back out to the street, where I had an opportunity to thank him again for the music, and most of all, the soul.

I gifted him a rosary which had just been blessed the day before by the priest who said Mass on the mountain, and told him to remember that the main battle is spiritual — not political or social. He was again gracious, if a bit sheepish about accepting it.

I wonder if he kept it.

At that point my host drove me back to his house for a cup of tea and introduced me to his brother, who was already waking up to head to the airport.

I got in the car, and promptly fell asleep on the long drive back to the airport — waking up to the sun streaming through the car window as we reached the roundabout at Dublin International.

It felt like waking up from a dream, and in so many ways it was a dream come true. The whole trip had been miraculous proof of God’s love and tenderness towards us. He wants to give us such good gifts. When we open ourselves to His loving kindness — Grace responding to Grace — and when we act in faith, amazing things start to happen, less as the exception than the norm.

That was an exceptional day — perhaps second only to my wedding and the birth of my children for days I will never forget.

Incidentally, on the day of my wedding, I picked “Her Mercy” as the song for the mother-son dance.

The song starts off very gently, but takes a sudden high-energy turn. The plan was for a few of my groomsmen to get the crowd to rush in and start dancing with us at the end of the song. That didn’t quite work. So instead it was just me and my mom, dancing like fools, for what felt like an awkwardly long time.

There was something contagious about the way Glen bared his soul for the world, without shame — sharing his songs with the entire world. Like the busker he played in the movie Once, he always sang and strummed like the song mattered more than the audience.

I am so grateful for his life’s work, and pray for his soul and for his family.