Positivity and good community spirit the main aim of new Killarney choir

The choir, which will be known as the ‘Stronger Together’ choir will be led by Sorcha O’Connor, who was the choral director for this year’s smash hit Killarney Musical Society production which packed the INEC for three nights.

Speaking to The Kerryman this week, Tom O’Shea, one of the main organisers involved in setting up the choir these last few weeks said the aim of the new choir is to be somewhere where people can come, have some fun and leave looking forward to the next meet up.

“It [the registration night] was a massive success. We got over 80 members signed up which is way more than we were thinking,” he laughed.

“I had kind of suspected that we’d maybe get good numbers of people registering because we knew the interest was there but you never know until people actually sign up officially so it was good to see so many people following through,” he continued.

Going on, Tom said that the choir is currently full and they won’t be taking in any more members for upcoming term which will run for an eight week block.

“There are some seriously good singers in the group but the focus for us was very much trying to make it a community choir with an emphasis on a feel-good factor. One of our mantras was that if you can sing in the shower, you can sing in our choir, that was more or less it,” he said with a laugh.

Tom said that the origins of this new choir were borne out of the COVID lockdown trend of Zoom quizzes and chats online.

“There was seven or eight of us, we were involved in the Gospel choir in Killarney for a few years and when COVID hit back in 2020, we formed a little WhatsApp group with maybe 16 or 18 of us in it out of the choir. I used to do weekly quizzes in there on a Friday night and we’d send each other jokes and all that, just things to keep the spirits up, you know and we called the group ‘Stronger Together’. So when that choir group finished at Christmas last year, a few of us said ‘look, maybe we should try and get something going’ in terms of a new choir.”

“So, out of that, we called this new group the ‘Stronger Together’ choir and in it, we are going to try and emphasise the community aspect of it. We want people to come along and one of the big things for us is that when people go away from rehearsals, we want them to look forward to coming back to the next one and not dreading it,” Tom continued.

The new choir will be in the very capable hands of Sorcha O’Connor who will act as the Choral director.

The final start date and venue for the new choir are set to be confirmed in the coming days according to Tom.