Ryan O’Shaughnessy was born in Dublin 1992 into a musical family. When he was 8 years old an opportunity arose for Ryan, to play the character Mark in RTE’s ”Fair City”, a role in which he claimed for almost a decade. He matured as the younger brother of Damien Halpin and spent his teen years on the Irish screens. By 17, singing became a priority for the North County Dublin native, and he left the hit TV soap to begin a musical career.
While studying at BIMM Dublin as a songwriter in 2012, Ryan penned his first collection of songs. Prior to the release of these songs, Ryan appeared in the same year on the finals of both The Voice of Ireland and Britains Got Talent. In his opening audition on Britains Got Talent, Ryan performed his self penned song “No Name”, which has accumulated over 47 million hits on YouTube. Ryan signed with Sony RCA in the UK under Colin Barlow. While he was there he worked on his debut EP which reached No.1 in Ireland for 2 consecutive months, in this time Ryan toured the length and breath of the UK and Ireland.
In July 2013 Ryan took part in the new Irish songwriting competition The Hit, going up against his former The Voice coach Brian Kennedy. O’Shaughnessy chose to release “Who Do You Love?” to enter the chart battle against Kennedy and that song entered the charts at No.3 in the Irish Single charts.
Being placed on the global songwriting map at a young age, Ryan has had the pleasure of travelling and writing with some of the worlds greatest, including Julia Fordham, Joy Williams, Mark Nevin, and Kimmie Rhodes, as well as writing and working for different publishing companies and studios. In the last 3 years O’Shaughnessy has toured the USA and Canada. In this time we have seen him releasing music for himself and other artists through his recording label Bayview Records. His latest album “Back to Square One” shows a maturity in his songwriting and musical taste.
In May 2018 Ryan performed for Ireland at the Eurovision contest in Lisbon, Portugal. In making it through the semi-final Ryan’s track “Together” went from 250/1 to 7/1 in the bookies, making it Ireland the most successful Eurovision entry in over 6 years.
