If you grew up in Boyle in the late 1980s or 1990s, there is a good chance you ate at the Lakeshore Restaurant in Lough Key Forest Park. What you may not have known is that the family behind it were living just a few metres from the water, with 800 acres of forest as their back garden, deer grazing on the front lawn at night, and a young girl called Maria doing her homework in between washing dishes and waiting tables.

That girl is Maria Liddy, and she joined us on Voices of Boyle for one of the most wide-ranging conversations we have recorded. From school musicals and Gay Byrne to near-death experiences, two miscarriages, and a business born from grief, this is a story worth hearing in full.

Lough Key as a Childhood Home

Maria was born in Enniskerry, Co. Wicklow, where her parents Paula and Dermot Lahiff ran a restaurant in Dalkey while the family lived up in the mountains. When Maria was 8, they made the move to Lough Key Forest Park, taking on the Lakeshore Restaurant and a house where the playground stands today.

It was only two and a half hours from Wicklow, but it felt like a different world.

“Imagine Lough Key Forest Park being your front garden,” she told us. “That was just the most amazing experience.”

The family threw themselves into the life of the park and the town. Paula and Dermot became involved in the Chamber of Commerce, the town twinning with France, and the groundwork that eventually brought the hot air ballooning championships to Boyle in 1989. Maria and her brother learned to swim at Doonshore so they could wander the 800 acres safely. When they were old enough, they worked in the restaurant. It was, as Maria put it, an amazing place to grow up.

“Imagine Lough Key Forest Park being your front garden. That was just the most amazing experience.”

School in Boyle and the Start of Something

Maria arrived at Scoil Chriost Rí in second class, plaited hair across her head in a Heidi style and a surname nobody in Boyle had encountered before. Lahiff, combined with the hairstyle, led her classmates to conclude she was German. It was a while before that got sorted out.

She loved school, describing herself as an average student who talked her way out of most things. She was in every school musical, and it was teacher Frank O’Mahony who spotted something in her and helped develop it. He helped her prepare for a drama audition at Trinity College Dublin, and when Maria and a classmate nominated him for a Gay Byrne Person of the Year award, they were called to go on radio the next day.

“That might have been my first radio interview,” she laughed. “But there was no stopping me then. If there was an opportunity to talk, I was there.”

New Zealand, London, and a Life Taking Shape

After her Leaving Cert in 1994 and two years of social studies at Sligo IT, Maria took a year out and travelled to New Zealand with her grandmother, who was 79 at the time. She worked in a special needs school there, spending time in an immersion class mixing Maori children with special needs alongside mainstream students.

When she returned to grey February Ireland, she rang her friend Sheila, who was training as a teacher in the UK, and two weeks later she was on a plane. She walked into a job working with adults with special needs, found an apartment, made a community, and stayed for two years. She came home in the end because her grandfather died suddenly just days after she had said goodbye to him at Christmas, and she knew she did not want to be that far away again.

Back in Ireland, she completed her degree, then took a job with the Youth Action Project in Sligo, a Garda-funded youth services initiative working with young people who had minor misdemeanors on their record. She loved it. She cooked fry-ups in the morning to get them through the door, ran drama and art workshops, made a film with them, and finished with a premiere in the Clarion Hotel, red carpet, tuxedos, and stretch limos included.

“They were wonderful guys,” she said. “I couldn’t walk down the street without somebody greeting me.”

The Dentist’s Waiting Room, 2012

After a master’s in criminology at Maynooth, with a thesis on families’ experiences of the youth justice system, Maria found herself in Dublin in a life that was not quite fitting. She was in a relationship that was not working, living in a city that was stressing her out, and she knew something had to give.

The message arrived dramatically. In 2012, she went to a dental hospital to have her wisdom teeth removed. On an empty stomach, she was given penicillin as a precaution. Within minutes she was in anaphylactic shock.

What she describes next is striking. As the medical team responded around her, Maria experienced something she calls a near-death experience: a slide toward warmth and beauty, a thin veil between this life and whatever comes next, an overwhelming sense of love pulling her forward. Then the adrenaline hit and she came back.

“I was loving wherever I was going,” she said. “And I was quite happy to go there.”

It took a year for the full message to sink in. On the anniversary of that day, she left her relationship with one suitcase and did not know where she was going. Six weeks later, she met her now-husband Arlo, a man she had briefly encountered at 16 in a friend’s kitchen and immediately hidden from because he was simply too much for her at that age.

“It felt like a very thin veil between this life and the next. I was just within reach of something beautiful.”

Family Constellations: Healing Across Generations

In the years since, Maria has built a life and a practice around the things that matter most to her. Central to this is family constellations, a therapeutic approach developed by Bert Hellinger in the 1960s, based on the idea that unresolved traumas in a family system are passed down through generations.

The core idea is that when something traumatic happens in a family and is not properly named or processed, a pattern takes root. Future generations may repeat versions of that pattern without knowing why, as an unconscious act of loyalty to those who came before them. Through family constellation work, those patterns can be identified, named, and released.

“We inherit things from our parents: our noses, the colour of our eyes, how tall we are,” Maria explained. “But we also inherit patterns of behaviour. And we do that sometimes to honour those who have gone before us.”

She gives the example of someone who cannot find love or cannot succeed in their career, no matter what they do. Through family constellations, it sometimes emerges that a grandparent was separated from a great love by circumstance and never recovered. A descendant, without knowing it, mirrors that suffering as a form of solidarity. Once the connection is made and the original trauma is honoured, the pattern can begin to shift.

Maria trained in family constellations from 2020 to 2022, partly through lockdown. She now runs workshops, and last year offered one a month.

The Lily and Max Miscarriage Care Packages

In 2020 and 2022, Maria had two miscarriages. She named the babies Lily and Max, because her work had taught her the importance of including those who are missing from a family system, even, and especially, the very small ones.

Sitting in bed after the second loss, she decided that something good had to come from it. She wrote a list of everything she needed in that moment: a bath, a cup of tea, something to do for the baby. From that list came the Lily and Max Miscarriage Care packages.

Each box is filled with locally sourced, biodegradable items: beeswax candles, tea from the Irish Tea Company in Cootehall, bath salts, bee bombs whose wildflower seeds will bloom every year as a living reminder. There is also a biodegradable urn and a ceremony to go with it, words and actions to mark the loss in a way that feels meaningful.

“Something good must come from this,” she said. “How I feel right now, I really want people to benefit from this experience.”

Maria was recently awarded an enterprise grant to help develop the Lily and Max boxes further. Her long-term vision is a natural burial ground in the area, with the care packages as the first step toward that goal.

“Something good must come from this. How I feel right now, I really want people to benefit from this experience.”

Coming Full Circle

The episode ends where it began, with Lough Key. When the hot air balloons returned to Boyle last September (2025) for the first time in years, Maria was out chasing them all the way to Highwood on a clear morning.

She grew up watching those balloons float over the forest park from her bedroom window, hearing the burners fire before school, seeing giant shapes fill the sky above the water. To watch them return, as a grown woman with a son of her own, landed differently.

“Looking around where we live, with the mountains and the lakes and the friendly people,” she said, “we live in such a gorgeous area steeped in ancient history. I feel really lucky to have been brought to Boyle and to still be living here.”

Listen to the Full Episode

This conversation runs to just under an hour and a half and covers ground that is hard to summarise. Maria is a natural storyteller with a lot of living behind her and a clear sense of what it all means. We think you will enjoy every minute of it.

 

Key Timestamps

00:00 — Introduction

01:26 — Born in Enniskerry, Co. Wicklow, growing up in the mountains

03:02 — The family move to Lough Key in 1985

05:54 — Life in the forest park: deer, mist, 800 acres of freedom

07:44 — Paula and Dermot’s role in bringing the hot air balloons to Boyle

09:38 — The whole family working together in the restaurant

11:00 — Swimming lessons at Doonshore for mum’s peace of mind

11:11 — Arriving at school in Boyle, the Heidi hair and the German rumours

12:46 — School musicals, Frank O’Mahony, and a Gay Byrne radio interview

16:46 — The performing bug takes hold

17:39 — Social studies in Sligo, three months in New Zealand with her grandmother

22:04 — Returning from New Zealand, moving to the UK, working with adults with special needs

23:39 — Homesickness, her grandfather’s death, the decision to come home

25:15 — Completing her degree, working with young offenders in Sligo

26:48 — The PAWS project, the premiere with tuxedos and stretch limos

28:10 — Master’s in criminology at Maynooth

30:48 — Research on the youth justice system, 31 family interviews

35:56 — The anaphylactic shock in the dentist’s waiting room, 2012

37:58 — A near-death experience: the thin veil, the warm light

40:03 — The wake-up call, leaving her relationship, one suitcase

41:31 — Meeting Arlo, two stars colliding

43:52 — Calling a baby into existence, the Hopi Indian tradition

46:13 — Training as a death doula

48:08 — What a death doula actually does

52:40 — Regrets at the end of life, acceptance, the liminal space

58:48 — Family constellations: what it is, how it works

01:05:16 — The Lily and Max miscarriage care packages

01:17:39 — Enterprise grant, long-term goal of a natural burial ground

01:19:42 — COVID memory: Arlo’s mobile sauna and Doonshore during lockdown

01:21:13 — Favourite thing about Boyle

01:22:18 — The balloons returning last September

Guest Bio

Maria Liddy (née Lahiff) grew up at Lough Key Forest Park in Boyle, where her parents Paula and Dermot Lahiff ran the Lakeshore Restaurant from 1985 to 1995. She studied social studies at Sligo IT, worked with young offenders through the Youth Action Project, and completed a master’s in criminology at Maynooth University. After a life-changing anaphylactic shock in 2012, she retrained as a death doula and family constellations facilitator. She is also the founder of Lily and Max Miscarriage Care, a range of locally sourced, biodegradable care packages for families who have experienced pregnancy loss. She lives in the Boyle area with her husband Arlo and their son Ruan.

Links and References

Lily and Max Miscarriage Care — Instagram: @lilyandmaxmiscarriagecare | Facebook: Maria Liddy

Family Constellations — Email: [email protected]

Paula and Dermot Le Hiff — Voices of Boyle Episode 20 (2023)

Bert Hellinger — founder of family constellations

Youth Action Project, Sligo — North Connacht Youth Services