Send us Fan Mail

Ep 91---

Carlo and Florence sit down with Vincent Beirne, originally from Plunkett Avenue in Boyle, now living in the west of Ireland, for a wide-ranging conversation about life, loss, healing and the path he has taken since losing his father.

Vincent talks about growing up in Boyle, his father's profound influence on his life, losing a property at 21 through adverse possession, the shamanic practice he trained in and now works with, his understanding of soul loss, the man he helped over a 22-year alcohol relapse, the election he stood in as an independent, and his vision for bringing a rambling house back to Boyle.

He also talks about the fire, the importance of looking within, and what he would put on a billboard in the town.

Check out for full blog post to go with this episode - https://www.voicesofboyle.com/vincentbeirne/

Join us on:

( Facebook )

( Instagram )

( YouTube )

( Website )

If you’d like to be on the show or if you know someone who would like to chat with us, then drop us an email at ( info@voicesofboyle.com )

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

Send us Fan Mail

Ep 90---

Carlo and Florence sit down with Dolores Sheerin, a Termon woman with a life full of stories.

From working as a telephonist in Galway in the late 1970s, where she answered a bomb threat during the Troubles and climbed onto the roof of the telephone exchange to watch Pope John Paul II bless them from his helicopter, to raising three sons in Boyle, joining the Moylurg Writers Group and discovering she could write, and travelling to Bosnia in 1994 with 26 suitcases of aid during the war.

Dolores also shares memories of characters and corners of Boyle that have largely disappeared, her deep faith, and the poem she wrote for the Moylurg writers simply called Boyle. A warm, funny, moving and genuinely memorable conversation.

Check out for full blog post to accompany this episode here - https://www.voicesofboyle.com/doloressheerin

Join us on:

( Facebook )

( Instagram )

( YouTube )

( Website )

If you’d like to be on the show or if you know someone who would like to chat with us, then drop us an email at ( info@voicesofboyle.com )

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

Send us Fan Mail

Ep 89---

Carlo sits down with David McGee, a young man from Boyle who has quietly built one of the most niche and impressive YouTube channels in Ireland.

Blue Star Line, his channel dedicated to historically accurate 3D ship animations, has over 127,000 subscribers and a single video with close to 7 million views.

David talks about growing up beside the boys school in Boyle, his grandfather Dick McGee's influence on his love of photography and storytelling, making short films on a Nintendo 3DS, his obsession with the Titanic since the age of four or five, and how a school musical called All Shook Up set him on the path to technical production.

He also covers commissions from Italian documentary companies, drone footage of the hot air balloons at Lough Key that went viral, working on the film "Ann" in Boyle, and what it takes to render a 20-minute animation that can take a month to produce.

A genuinely fascinating conversation about creativity, craft and a passion pursued quietly but brilliantly.

Check out the full blog post on this episode - https://www.voicesofboyle.com/davidmcgee

Join us on:

( Facebook )

( Instagram )

( YouTube )

( Website )

If you’d like to be on the show or if you know someone who would like to chat with us, then drop us an email at ( info@voicesofboyle.com )

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

Send us Fan Mail

Ep 88---

Carlo sits down with Mairead Cogan, the youngest of six children raised on a farm in the Curlew Mountains, who went on to play GAA, break her leg and ankle in 2019, discover a passion for coaching, and found her own fitness business, Supple Fitness.

But this episode is about more than fitness. Mairead also talks about two volunteer trips to Africa with Plant the Planet Games in partnership with Self Help Africa and Warriors for Humanity. A warm, honest and genuinely moving conversation about hard work, community, perspective, and what really matters in life.

Check out the full blog post - https://www.voicesofboyle.com/maireadcogan

Join us on:

( Facebook )

( Instagram )

( YouTube )

( Website )

If you’d like to be on the show or if you know someone who would like to chat with us, then drop us an email at ( info@voicesofboyle.com )

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

Send us Fan Mail

Ep 87---

In towns like Boyle, a post office was never just a place to buy stamps or send parcels. It was where news arrived before phones ever rang, where pensions were collected with a handshake and a chat, and where generations crossed the same threshold week after week. The red brick building on Shop Street stood quietly at the centre of it all, watching the town change while somehow staying the same.

For decades, people stepped inside carrying letters, savings books, worries, and good news. Behind the counter for the past few decades stood a familiar face who saw Boyle through its busiest days and its quietest moments, through the shift from handwritten envelopes to digital screens, from queues at the counter to a changing world outside the door.

Today both Florence and I are sitting down with the last postmaster of the old Post Office, Paul Forde. This is a conversation about community, memory, and a place that meant far more than its walls ever suggested. Because when a post office leaves a building like that, it’s not just a relocation. It marks the end of an era in the life of the town.

You’re very welcome to the Voices of Boyle. This is episode 87 with Paul Forde.

If you'd like to see some photos of the final day of business with Paul and customers, then please click here

Join us on:

( Facebook )

( Instagram )

( YouTube )

( Website )

If you’d like to be on the show or if you know someone who would like to chat with us, then drop us an email at ( info@voicesofboyle.com )

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

Send us Fan Mail

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.

Check out the full blog post to accompany this episode: https://www.voicesofboyle.com/marialiddy

Join us on:

( Facebook )

( Instagram )

( YouTube )

( Website )

If you’d like to be on the show or if you know someone who would like to chat with us, then drop us an email at ( info@voicesofboyle.com )

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

Send us Fan Mail

Ep 85---

David Cryan grew up on a farm in Cloonloo, in a household where after-school hours meant feeding cattle, mucking out sheds and drinking raw milk straight from the cow. He went to St. Mary's secondary school in Boyle, mitched exactly once and got caught, and remembers the morning assemblies with Father Lavender or Father Early before everyone headed off to class.

From there, the conversation moves through the Boyle of the late 1980s and early 1990s, a town David describes as a place that was genuinely buzzing. He talks about working behind the bar in Parkers nightclub as a 17-year-old, the nights when you could not get through the door of the Moylurg before half nine, the factions and the fighting that were somehow just part of the culture, and the busloads of people coming over from Carrick-on-Shannon because Boyle was simply the better night out.

Then, in 1992, everything changed. David was involved in an accident and left paralysed. He was 20 years old. In the years that followed, he faced the reality of his situation largely without professional support, which simply did not exist in the way it does today. Alcohol became a way of coping, and he is honest about how that played out over a long stretch of years, until the death of a close friend became the moment that changed his direction. He gave up drink, started counselling, and began to deal with things properly.

David also touches on his brief but enjoyable time in local politics, filling a vacant seat on behalf of a cousin who passed away. He talks about his electric drive-assist wheelchair, the freedom it has given him to get around, and the gaps that still exist in accessibility across the town. He ends with a clear message to younger listeners: you have one life, and you are better off living it as yourself.

Check out the blog post for this episode - https://www.voicesofboyle.com/davidcryan

Join us on:

( Facebook )

( Instagram )

( YouTube )

( Website )

If you’d like to be on the show or if you know someone who would like to chat with us, then drop us an email at ( info@voicesofboyle.com )

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

Send us Fan Mail

Ep 84---

Florence sits down with Georgette, a Somerset-born creative who has been living just outside Boyle for the past ten years. Georgette grew up in the English countryside, left home at 17, worked in Egypt as a teenager, and spent years moving between cities before eventually landing in rural Wales and then Roscommon.

Now she works part time at Leitrim Design House and has recently launched Crack and Crackle, a small handmade business producing quality sauna hats from her home. The conversation covers her love of craft, why sewing is a life skill the next generation is being denied, the explosion of sauna culture in Ireland, and why she believes handmade will always beat mass produced.

A warm, honest and genuinely entertaining episode about creativity, community and following an idea all the way through.

Visit the full blog post for this episode on our website - https://www.voicesofboyle.com/georgettemarshall/

Join us on:

( Facebook )

( Instagram )

( YouTube )

( Website )

If you’d like to be on the show or if you know someone who would like to chat with us, then drop us an email at ( info@voicesofboyle.com )

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