Brendan Gleeson: ‘Ireland is basically America now. People come here to find prosperity and opportunity – to find life’

“I’m fed up looking at the ground,” he told the crowd. “It’s time to stand up, breathe the air, look around...”

Almost 13 years later, he is sitting in an upstairs room in Merrion Square, a short stroll from where he made that speech. What does he see, in Ireland now, when he looks around?

“We are essentially the United States of America now, a place where people come to find prosperity, opportunity — to find life,” he says.

“OK, we haven’t coped with it. But I don’t remember the American government saying: ‘We’re going to have blanket housing for our incoming immigrants.’ They allowed the market to do it — and what happened was a hell of a lot of misery.”

Referring to Martin Scorsese’s film about immigrant tensions in New York in 1863, he says: “I did Gangs of New York, so I’m not advocating that.”

‘I think we have to start building towards a population of 10 million’

Last week he went for a walk at Malahide Castle, near where he lives, and had a realisation.

“I was thinking, this used to belong to one person. It belongs now to a whole plethora of people,” he says.

“The people who mostly use it a lot of the time are the foreigners who’ve come over here, and are working here and living here. They love all the public spaces. They access the things that we in Ireland don’t. In Ireland now, we have to start bending it around to what makes people happy.”

I mention his impassioned tirade on The Late Late Show in 2006 about the state of the Irish health system.

“If you’re trying to get me to go cribbing, I’ve decided I’m fed up about non-creative outrage,” he says, meaning (I think) the kind of outrage that doesn’t change anything.

Perhaps it’s something to do with advancing years — he’ll turn 69 next month — but he says that “instead of roaring about everything that’s wrong, I want solutions now.”

In hoping for a better, more inclusive Ireland, he finds himself drawn to “people who have benign influences” and away from the “brutish, non- communicative” males of the kind he has sometimes played — characters who are, he thinks, “a cliche” now.

“I’m looking at my lads,” he says of his four sons, Domhnall, Rory, Fergus and Brian.

“I’m looking at their generation and underneath it and the way they interact with their partners. The way they go around with buggies. The way they go around the place with babies in slings.”

He walks around the offices of the Irish Traditional Music Archive with a cup of tea in one hand and a glass of water in the other.

Dressed all in black, including the shoes, he looks not unlike like his character from the 2014 film Calvary.

He’s here to promote his new film. It’s not a bells-and-whistles Hollywood blockbuster, but a moving 60-minute film about something close to his heart.

Directed by Ciarán Ó Maonaigh, and filmed over five days in January 2022, Brendan Gleeson’s Farewell to Hughes’s is about a pub in Smithfield, Dublin, that was well known for promoting traditional Irish music for over 30 years before it shut its doors in 2021.

“One of the things I’d like to do with this film is to add to the discussion about traditional Irish music,” he says.

“It’s something that’s precious. I remember talking for years, even with people like John Boorman [who cast him as Martin Cahill in The General] about how you can capture Irish music without heading into the ‘come-all-ye’, without heading into that horrible Paddywhackery country?

“I’m never sure how it is going to be achieved with cameras, because they are intrusive of their nature. Whereas Ciarán is a musician himself, a magnificent fiddle player.

“He understands. He can go in there with a camera and find a way of just capturing the soul of the music.”

‘We have this coming to us now. I think it justifies the need for nationhood’

Gleeson can understand why traditional Irish music years ago didn’t connect with many people, “because there was a certain amount of officialdom and staidness about the way it was presented. Most people didn’t see it or hear it in the way it attracted me.”

Part of the attraction was that his father, Frank, was from Thurles, and the family would troop down from Artane for their summer holidays, where cousins, uncles and aunt would sing “a lot”.

Aged 15, while in Connemara visiting school friends who had gone to the Gaeltacht, he was entranced by the sound of uilleann pipes.

​After hitching a lift to Spiddal “with the twilight coming”, he slept in a brick shed and left at dawn in the teeming rain. Walking over a stone bridge “vaguely like the one in The Quiet Man” he heard something.

“To this day,” he says, “I can still hear what came floating across to me ­— the sound of pipes playing. I don’t think it was real. It was in my imagination.

"It was whatever way the wind was whistling in the bog that morning, but I’ll never forget it. I think I was open to it, because I hadn’t slept very much.”

In his late teens, he started playing guitar with a friend from Waterford, Gerry Madden, who played mandolin.

“Gerry had the tunes. I had to try and accompany him.”

They ended up busking in Germany.

“The Germans were very receptive to Irish music, because their own folk music had such horrible connotations because of the war.”

Aged 19, he went to Walton’s musical instrument shop in Dublin and bought a mandolin for “a tenner”.

“It was my birthday about two months later and my grandmother came in and gave me my grandfather’s mandolin. It one of the best days of my life.”

Does he still play it?

“I still have it,” he says ruefully. “My younger brother, Frank, sat on it. I left it on the couch — so I take the blame for it.”

Though he played the fiddle in his roles in Cold Mountain, The Banshees of Inisherin and the new documentary, he harbours no notions of being a virtuoso.

“I try not to get in the way,” he says.

He returns to a subject he’s equally passionate about.

“There is so much vibrancy now in Ireland. We have a kind of amazing prosperity. Who knows, it might be over next week, but I think we have to start building towards a population of 10 million.

"We have to start seeing ourselves differently — as a place where we benefited for years from going over to the States, or even to England where there was a booming economy and a need for workers.

“We have this coming to us now. I think it justifies the need for nationhood. I think it justifies all the stuff that we felt was a duty to some sort of a heritage. To me, it’s: ‘Look how far we’ve come.’ It’s a wonderful place, throbbing with opportunity.

“And don’t forget that we have little gems like Irish music.”​

​Brendan Gleeson’s Farewell To Hughes’s is in the Light House, Dublin, and the Pálás, Galway, from Saturday, March 2. See itma.ie