Maria Liddy - Our Home In Lough Key

Ep 86---

Maria Liddy's story begins in Enniskerry, Co. Wicklow, where her parents ran a restaurant in Dalkey while the family lived up in the mountains. When Maria was 8, they made the leap to Boyle, taking on the Lakeshore Restaurant at Lough Key Forest Park. It was only two and a half hours away, but it felt like a different world.

Growing up with 800 acres as your back garden turns out to be as magical as it sounds. Maria describes watching deer graze on the front lawn by lamplight on winter evenings, the mist over the water on September mornings, and the chaos of the ballooning championships when the whole park came alive. Her mother insisted she and her brother learn to swim at Doonshore so they could wander freely without anyone worrying. The whole family washed dishes, worked the shop, and waited tables as soon as they were old enough.

School life in Boyle left a deep mark. Maria arrived at Scoil Chriost Rí with a plaited Heidi hairstyle and the unusual surname Le Hiff, and was briefly assumed to be German. She threw herself into school musicals under Frank O'Mahony, who she later nominated for a Gay Byrne Person of the Year award, landing her first-ever radio interview in the process. She credits both Frank and Boyle itself for giving her a rounded foundation she drew on for years afterwards.

Her twenties were full of movement: social studies in Sligo IT, three months in New Zealand with her grandmother, two years working with adults with special needs in outer London, and then a return home prompted by her grandfather's death. Back in Ireland, she worked with young offenders through the Youth Action Project in Sligo, completed her degree, and eventually pursued a master's in criminology at Maynooth, with a thesis on the youth justice system and the experience of families within it.

The pivot came in 2012. On an empty stomach in a Dublin dental hospital waiting room, a penicillin reaction sent Maria into anaphylactic shock. She describes what happened in the minutes that followed as a near-death experience, a slide toward something warm and beautiful, before the adrenaline brought her back. It took a year for the message to land fully, but on the anniversary of that day she left her relationship, packed one suitcase, and walked out. Six weeks later she met her now-husband Arlo, a man she had briefly hidden from in a kitchen at sixteen because he was simply too much for her.

She and Arlo have one son, Ruan, who Maria says announced himself before he was conceived. She has also had two miscarriages, in 2020 and 2022, and speaks about them with the honesty and gentleness of someone who has done the work of acknowledging them fully. Those losses, combined with her training as a death doula and family constellations facilitator, led her to create the Lily and Max miscarriage care packages: locally sourced, biodegradable boxes designed to give families something tangible to hold during one of the hardest experiences a person can go through.

The episode ends with Maria talking about the hot air balloons returning to Boyle last September, chasing one all the way to Highwood, and feeling, as she put it, really, really lucky to have been brought to Boyle and to still be living here.

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Thanks to Brendan O' Dowd for creating and recording the musical piece for the podcast.