Padraig joins the Three Sopranos and RTÉ Symphony Orchestra for Leisureland show

Three of Ireland’s finest sopranos – Celine Byrne, Regina Nathan and Cara O’Sullivan – will join forces with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra and Loughrea tenor Padraig Connaughton in Galway on Wednesday, June 5 to present The Three Sopranos Summer Gala.

The concert, conducted by John Finucane, will take place in Leisureland for RTÉ Radio 1’s John Murray Show and will be presented by Kathryn Thomas.

There will also be concerts in Limerick, Cork and Waterford as part of the same series.  Kathryn Thomas will report for the John Murray Show following concerts in Galway and Limerick and there will be a final radio item on Monday, June 10 following concerts in Cork and Waterford.

Each of the four concerts will feature a John Murray Show listener, selected through the programme’s Sing with the Sopranos Search, and the Galway participant is garage service manager and sheep farmer Padraig Connaughton from Loughrea. He will sing the Neapolitan song O Sole Mio on stage with the sopranos and the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, and is currently being coached for this role by Celine Byrne.

Through a remarkable series of events, in recent months, Celine has discovered family relatives in Galway, so this opportunity to coach Padraig means a lot to her. Celine, through her grandmother’s stepbrother, Major General Kevin Murphy, now living in Galway, has traced family connections to the Quinn family in Tuam whose family-owned pub, The Rustic Vaults, has been part of the Tuam community for over 100 years.

Padraig works in Leahy’s Garage in Loughrea and is also a part-time sheep farmer who says he sings to his flock to round them up.

The son of Leonard and Lucy Connaughton, Padraig lives in Clostoken, Loughrea, with his wife Helena and their daughter, Clara who was born in March.   Music has always been a big part of his life and for some years, he performed locally with the West Coast Big Band.

He is delighted with this opportunity to feature in the Leisureland concert.

“To sing with an orchestra anywhere would be a dream and it would be a great thing for my little girl to hear in a few years that her old man was a singer and not just a man who works in a garage and farms”, he says.