Introducing Ríoghnach 

Ríoghnach Connolly is a traditional Irish singer and flute player from County Armagh. From jazz and blues, to séan-nós and folk hop, Ríoghnach is a unique talent working across various musical platforms and with the bands, Afro Celt Sound System, The Breath, Honeyfeet, and Band of Burns. Her many projects, including making music with refugees and keening at funerals, connects Ríoghnach to a multitude of communities in Manchester. She is currently BBC Folk Singer of the Year. 

“The Mancs that are here are all first, second, third generation Irish, and they would have come from North Manchester. And Levenshulme was the first port of call after Longsight, and, just, basically, the Irish got further south and south as they went along.” 

Ríoghnach’s Musical Life History 

Ríoghnach moved to Manchester to study for a Literature degree, but her association with the city goes back further, as her grandparents lived there for forty years. 

“It kind of went back and forth. My grandfather was born in Armagh and moved to Manchester, and then my mother was born in Manchester and moved to Armagh. And then I was born in Armagh and moved to Manchester. Back and forth.” 

Ríoghnach’s mother learnt Irish dancing during this earlier era for the family in Manchester and, in turn, she passed this on to the next generation back in Armagh. 

“My mother ran a dancing school. She learned how to dance over here from an Irish woman and then started a dancing school and called it, Scoil Rince Ard Mhaca, the Irish Dance School of Armagh, in the ‘80s, which was a really big, big deal, back then. And so we always had the Irish dancing and music.” 

Big cultural influences came from both sides of the family. 

“My father was a piper and he was probably one of the first musicians in the Armagh Pipers Club. And that was a really big deal when it first started, because, you know, it would have been very dangerous to even have an instrument up north at the time.” 

On moving to Manchester, Ríoghnach revisited the Irish community familiar to her grandparents, whilst also enjoying the unique mix of traditions present in the contemporary city. 

“The Irish scene was there to, kind of, really nurture me along, because there was a one-handed bodhrán player called Vinnie Short, who went to school with my grandmother and he took me up to the North Manchester men, and they were called The Oddfellows. And they played every night, every Monday night at 9pm, in the Oddies, up at Middleton.” 

“Manchester itself has a very specific cultural melting pot and everybody’s in it to get through the winter together. I wouldn’t have come across the African music that I did, or the West Asian, or South Asian music.” 

The Purpose and Motivations of Ríoghnach’s Music-Making 

“Music’s purpose for me is to sit outside the discourse, sit outside the prescribed narrative. It’s the place where I can totally create an entirely different life, because it’s one where I do come into contact with every living human being, regardless of class or creed or gender conformity. There’s no rules, because everybody brings something to the communal pot.” 

Ríoghnach’s generosity with her talent sees her facilitate music in schools, with a particular focus on raising awareness of the refugee and migrant experience. 

“It’s all about communities for me and that’s being a community musician - means you teach as well as performing.” 

One project, Harmonise, run with Music Action International, reaches the wider community and parents through a public concert that unites various schoolchildren. 

“They all not only sing the songs from the different countries that they've learned from their refugee facilitators, but they also get a chance to write a song about what it's like, if they were a refugee. So they ultimately are learning about empathy and agency very early, and accountability.” 

As a lyricist, a workshop facilitator and a community musician, Ríoghnach drives social change. 

“I don't politicise my music all the time, but if I'm writing music, I'll write about things that matter, because you can't, in good conscience, sing about, you know, buttercups and dandelions.” “For curiosity, it's been a really good journey as well. Just to learn about that keeps you alert, keeps you switched on about all of the undercurrent, political kind of legislative… well, I try not to use bad language!” 

Music-Making in Manchester 

“It isn't for the weather that you stay, it's for the people. And the community over here is really, really beautiful. It is really beautiful.” 

Ríoghnach connects with musicians from all walks of life in Manchester. 

“When I started doing gigs, I started doing gigs with other musicians that I came across and they were all blues musicians, or they were jazz musicians, or they were crazies, stray cats. I had sort of like an open door policy, like a jam house where I had a big open-plan kitchen. And I just cooked for everybody that came in after a gig. Everybody just came to our house, and everybody was welcome.” 

Ríoghnach maps the Noble Call performance tradition, familiar from growing up surrounded by music in Ireland, onto musicians from all and every culture in Manchester. 

“You’d go to the oldest person in the room, and you’d go, ‘Sing me a song’, and it was just like this natural thing that happened since Armagh, since the Pipers Club, where you got to learn music from other cultures and other languages and other scales.” 

Four bands, imminent album releases, her BBC award, the future of Ríoghnach’s music is exciting. But a current project, where she has brought relatives over to Manchester to record songs, ensures that the history of the tradition stays very much at the forefront. 

“My father spoke Irish and I think the family project has been quite phenomenal, because we just started recording, just to document the songs that we could of the family. And we got a recording from my great great aunt on tape in an archive, and we digitised it, so when we turned it up we could hear all of my relations in the room talking to her. And it made the hairs stand on the back of my neck. We all started crying, because when would you ever hear your great great grandad’s voice?” 

“You’re not just there to get adulation from people. You’re there to pass it forward because that’s what tradition is.”