WATCH: Dublin's buskers gather to say goodbye to Glen Hansard with the songs he gave them

Glen Hansard spent decades turning Dublin's pavements into a stage, and this week those same streets turned into a place of mourning. The Oscar-winning musician died in a single-vehicle crash in the early hours of Wednesday, and by Thursday evening his fellow buskers had gathered to say goodbye the way he would have wanted, guitar in hand.

The crowd assembled at the Luke Kelly statue near Grafton Street, close to the Gaiety Theatre. It is the exact spot where Hansard held his beloved Christmas Eve charity busk every year.

Musicians sang "Falling Slowly", the Oscar-winning song Hansard wrote with Marketa Irglova for the 2007 film "Once". "The Auld Triangle" also rang out through the crowd.

The tribute was pulled together by Jamie Harrington, a fellow Ballymun native who had known Hansard for 15 years.

"We all have different experiences of Glen and Glen's music and that's why there's so many here," Harrington told the crowd.

"He touched so many people's lives in so many different ways and we're here to celebrate Glen, to listen to his music and to be together."

Harrington later told the Irish Times he first met Hansard when the singer came to film a music video at his youth center. After the shoot, someone mentioned they were hungry and Hansard bought everyone chips.

"That showed me what kind of man he was," Harrington said.

"He saw hungry kids and just went 'you're part of my tribe now.' I've been friends with him ever since."

Glen Hansard.

One guitar on display at the tribute had been given to a musician by Hansard himself, because the player did not own one of his own.

Dean Scurry, an artist who once stood alongside Hansard during the Apollo House homelessness protest in 2016, said the tribute captured something bigger than music.

"Glen took action. He made music. He connected people, he connected everybody from paupers to presidents," Scurry told the Irish Times.

"He connected people through music and through love. That's activism."

Scurry also praised the young performers who turned up with instruments and grief in equal measure.

"I think it's great that young people came out today and it wasn't sprinkled with the superstars," he said. "It was young people. Young boys and girls with guitars and broken hearts, they wanted to sing songs for their friend."

As the crowd began to drift away, Harrington called them back one more time with a message that felt very much in keeping with the man they had come to honor.

"Don't think yiz are getting this for nothing," Harrington shouted, according to the Irish Times.

"When ye get home please go online and donate to Dublin Simon, a fiver or a tenner. Or if you're loaded give them a thousand."

Given Hansard's decades of fundraising for Dublin's homeless community through his own Christmas Eve busks, it was a request his friends said he would have been proud of.