BIG READ: Iconic Boherlahan shop to reopen its doors this month

With a target opening day of Wednesday, June 11, it’s all systems go for Liam Maher and Santina Coyle as they put the finishing touches on the brand new Mace and Applegreen in Boherlahan.

This has been a labour of love for Liam Maher for nearly a year now, since his company LMP Developments purchased the property in 2024.

Locals across the county will recognise the space as the former site of O’Dwyers petrol station, which served Boherlahan and the wider community for decades before shutting some years ago.

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Liam Maher told the Tipperary Star that the reality of opening a new premises, complete with a fresh food deli, off-licence, and a car wash is starting to set in.

“It’s only when the shop got to a certain stage, it’s after that then I thought ‘Oh my God!, are we really doing this like?!’ We actually had looked at it years and years ago about trying to buy it off Eddie and Helen and get it going and just maybe it wasn’t the right time and now it’s just when it did come up again for offer, I thought this has to happen.

“It’s a challenge of course, and being from the village for my whole life, it’s nice to see it being such a transformation in the village and even to talk around it is absolutely crazy. The amount of people passing and stopping in, or if you meet someone out and about, for example I met a few people in Clonmel and they said: ‘Oh, you're from Boherlahan, and what’s the story with the new shop there?’ That’s when it really hits you, so it is very, very exciting.”

Liam’s partner Santina Coyle has a background in catering, hospitality, and customer service. She outlined just how much work was involved from taking the old O’Dwyers site and turning it into something new.

“We have our manager and our deli manager for the last month or so. So they’ve been helping out more or less with the kitting out of the whole operation. But before that, there was just myself and Liam, and there was a lot of work. 
We stripped it right back, organising suppliers, organising people to get it all to come together was nearly a chore in itself.

“Then when it did fall into place, it just seemed to kind of roll on what it should be doing and we’re at the stage now where we’re stocking and getting ready to open, which is really the exciting time off it.”

Located by the Boherlahan Parish Hall, Liam is confident that the new shop will be transformative for the local community and offer a number of essential services for people right across the county.

“Listening to people that I would have known for years, I would have been gone out of Boherlahan for years, but would have went to school next door would remember this shop when it was only like a little house up in the corner. So I can still see that for what it was at the time and I can still remember all the transformations.

"I've seen Eddie O’Dwyer’s mother working in the shop it was that many years ago, which is scary. I suppose it’s going to be such a transformation really from what it looked like in years gone by, and will add so much to the community."

During the shop’s construction, Councillor Declan Burgess said the reopening will also serve as a fantastic boost to the local economy. He took to social media to share his delight at Liam and Santina’s venture.

“This new business in Boherlahan is widely welcomed by the community and will be a great boost to the local economy. Wishing Liam and his family all the best in this exciting new venture. This will be a fantastic addition to both the village and the community."

Located on the R660 in the heart of the village, the former O’Dwyer’s shop, which has been closed for several years, will now be given a new lease of life.”

Liam also insisted that this shop has historically been a meeting point for people outside of Boherlahan too, and has served the people of North Tipperary well over the years.

“There was guys there that I met some time ago and they told me they would often go golfing together and the crowd of them from Thurles would come over and O’ Dwyer’s shop was always the meeting point for everybody. So they’d meet at O’Dwyer’s and head from there to wherever it was they were going to golf that week. It has always just been a real meeting place and a lot of people from North Tipp all came this way, so it really is a site that has served people even beyond the population of Boherlahan.

Looking to the future, Liam and Santina say that the new state-of-the-art shop will not only offer a range of services to locals, but create jobs and opportunities for continued work in the community for years to come.

Santina says that this new operation will need a strong team of skilled workers to help it function day-to-day.

“We’ve had a great response to advertisements that we’ve put out. Mace themselves organise a lot of the recruitment side of things, so in one way it’s kind of out of our control.

“But we’ll have about 15 to 20 staff by the time we’re finished, which will is still good for what we have built and our hopes for the future of the shop.

The shop itself now will be state-of-the-art, nothing but the best and it has everything you’d need.

Even though it’s a convenience store, the range of products we have in it is just amazing As well as being your standard convenience store, it’s also an off-license. There’s the ATM too for the public to access which is huge. 
Two coffee machines, a full range of groceries, a dairy wall with fresh producer, we’ll eventually have a working car wash out the back, four fuel tanks where there used to be two, and one is open 24 hours a day. So it’s a massive undertaking but a huge amount we have to offer here.”

Liam and Santina ended by telling the Tipperary Star about their hopes for the new shop, how it will grow as a pillar of the Boherlahan community and what they hope Maher's Mace and Applegreen will look in years to come.

Liam said the importance of having a place like this in Boherlahan cannot be understated, particularly in recent years.

“Well I suppose realistically I think the likes of Covid-19 and the pandemic a few years ago changed an awful lot of things as far as people’s mindsets are concerned. It probably brought an awful lot of families closer together and also what it did was all the local shops would have done very well throughout that lockdown period because people couldn’t travel. And I think that made a lot of people realise the importance of having something like this on their doorstep and that missing element if it isn’t there in the local community.

“So I do think it’s because of all of that and, as I say, it’s that change in people’s mindset back to that local thing. 
It’s all local. Pubs aren’t like what they used to be at all. So now it’s shops with a fresh cup coffee and a deli that is serving as that meeting point that wasn’t there before.

“It’s gone from pubs to coffee, and that’s realistically where we’re at these days.

Santina added that supporting local businesses and local people is what Irish people like to nowadays and that it’s an important mindset to have.

“I think Liam is right in what he says there, it is what people do now, they stay local. If they can get it local they try and do so.

“It’s very important because when you take a shop out of a village for example, it becomes dull. You can't underestimate the importance it brings to a town or a village and just how much it can light up the local community, and that’s exactly what we’re trying to do here in Boherlahan.”

Maher’s Mace and Applegreen , on the R660 road will open its doors to the public on Wednesday, June 11.

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