Jenny Bourke

Jenny is a music graduate of Queen’s University Belfast and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Her operatic roles include Lucy Lockett The Beggar’s Opera, Mother Goose The Rakes Progress, Sorceress Dido and Aeneus, Shepherd boy Tosca, Kate Pinkerton Madame Butterfly, Third Lady Magic Flute, Florence Pike Albert Herring, Queen of the Gypsies Bohemian Girl, Dorabella Cosi fan tutti, Flora (cover) La Traviata with Castleward Opera, RCS, Opera Fringe. 

Jenny is a recognised and established vocal tutor within Northern Ireland, recently qualifying as a Vocal Health First Aider. Her personal performances have taken her to New York, Beijing, Paris and all over the UK and Ireland and she is delighted to have joined her home company, Northern Ireland Opera, in 2022. Since then she has performed as a soloist at several recital events for NIO, Chorus for La Traviata and Tosca, covered the role of Flora Bervoix in La Traviata and sang in the Salon Series ‘Seawrack’ and ‘Les Nuits D’ete.’ More recently she sang the role of the Stepmother in the company’s well received production of The Juniper Tree by

Philip Glass and Robert Moran followed by her main stage debut in 2024 as Filipeyvna in Eugene Onegin by Tchaikovsky. In 2026 Jenny is delighted to be joining the internationally-acclaimed period ensemble, Arcangelo in a recording and performance of Handel's Saul in London and a European tour of St. Matthew’s Passion.

Rachel Finnegan

Rachel Finnegan is currently a second year music student at queens university Belfast. She has been involved in many musical theatre productions and concert performances throughout newry and Belfast from a very young age, such as playing Ariel the female lead role in footloose, with Newry Musical Society. Rachel has also been a private musical theatre, classical singing and piano teacher for 4 years now, which she hopes to continue as she finishes her studies.

Gail McConnell is from Belfast. Her debut poetry book, The Sun is Open (Penned in the Margins, 2021), about her father’s murder by the IRA, won The John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Award and The Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize. A Swedish translation by Henrik C. Enbohm was published by Rámus förlag in 2025. She has also published Northern Irish Poetry and Theology and two poetry pamphlets: Fothermather and Fourteen. Gail has made two arts features based on her poetry for BBC Radio 4: Fothermather and The Open Box and one on Seamus Heaney and the Troubles. Gail is Reader in English at Queen’s University Belfast, where she is a fellow of the Mitchell Institute and the Seamus Heaney Centre. From the Arts Council of Northern Ireland Gail received the Major Artist Award.