Very often while interviewing people, I've noticed that they'll preface something very interesting and honest about their lives by saying "I hope to good God my mother or father doesn't read this". So you can imagine poor Aedin Moloney's position with her father Paddy -- he of Chieftains fame -- sitting right opposite her. Not only will he be reading this interview -- he's in it!

And so every time she steers out of daddy's-little-girl territory, he's there to gently shepherd her back in, reminding her, for example, "I honestly don't remember you ever drinking too much". (This after she tells me she's proud of being sober for the past 14 years.) Not that she needs too much prodding to sing a hymn of enviable family bliss -- "we're so close we even vacation together," she enthuses at one point. They're both breezy, friendly and, understandably, quite watchful.

They're together in New York because Paddy was coming back from a gig and from visiting Aedin's Texas-based brother -- he's a "rocket scientist with NASA", Paddy proudly tells me -- and decided to swing by Manhattan, where Aedin lives and juggles the directorship of a theatre company with a day job as an executive assistant to the CEO of creditcards.com. And so if they're extra affectionate with each other it might be as much because it's a reunion as because they're on the record.

We establish up front, however, that he calls her "Piggy," rather than her unusually spelled first name (pronounced "Aideen"). "At this stage of my life I don't mind telling you that," she laughs. "It's a nickname that goes back to when I was a little girl. I used to take off Miss Piggy. The name stuck and to this day I don't think my nephews even know my real name."

The moniker is also because she was "piggy in the middle", born three years after Aonghus and 10 years before Padraig (although she doggedly refuses to reveal her age). The family home was in Milltown, Dublin, and they both tell me Aedin and her brothers had a "very normal childhood. Paddy's celebrity didn't mean that they had any more money than other families at that time, they tell me.

"The Chieftains were part-time back then," Paddy remembers, "so we were still trying to make it as musicians. There wouldn't have been a lot of money and it was only when Gay Byrne attended the honorary ceremony for the honorary doctorate that Trinity gave me that my mother realised I had a real career."

If you measure wealth in celebrity friends, however, they were stinking rich. Names such as Sting, Mick Jagger and Van Morrison roll off Paddy's tongue -- some have called him an incorrigible name dropper -- and it was only when a classmate of Aedin's accusingly told her "Sting slept in your bed" ("not while I was there," she hastily adds), that the extent of her father's celebrity dawned on her. She and Paddy were apart for long periods in those years, however, as the Chieftains toured extensively -- her mother (and Paddy's wife) Rita took care of the three kids. "It was a hard life," he remembers. "We have scaled it back a bit since then."

"When Daddy came home -- those were always the best times," Aedin says. "If he was doing a show he'd come home in his red Volkswagen Beetle and wake me up and wrap me up in his sheepskin coat and take me to the chipper. This was the most spectacular event for a child -- it could be after midnight when everyone else would be asleep."

She was, she tells me, a "shy, awkward" girl with a tendency to be precocious at the same time. As a teenager, she sought an outlet through acting, attending the (now defunct) Oscar Theatre School in Dublin, but after secondary school she went to do a secretarial course.

"Acting was my passion though," she adds. "And I acted in a number of Shakespearean plays, including one by Jim Sheridan's brother, Peter. She's adamant that she never used Paddy's name -- "the couple of times I did use it, it never worked for me". However, he does mention that he would sometimes get her PA jobs with friends of his. One of these was a stint with the architect, Sam Stephenson.

She was unemployed for a time in the Eighties ("like everyone") and moved to London, where she made some headway in the acting career. She appeared in a film called Nora with Ewan McGregor and appeared in numerous television programmes, including Ballykissangel. These were her wild years and she tells me that she began drinking a lot. (Paddy mentions that he was never a big drinker and that there's no alcohol before Chieftains' concerts). With support, she managed to beat alcoholism.

Aedin has a kind of vulnerable, almost girlish quality to her -- even after a decade and a half there are no hard New York edges that I can see. I ask Paddy if he ever worried about her and he tells me, not more than usual. "She was always a strong character, I knew she would do well."

After years of flitting between London and New York, she moved to Astoria, Queens, in 1995 and has lived there ever since. She made ends meet working as a personal assistant but scored a number of acting jobs and eventually founded her own theatre company -- Fallen Angel -- which produces new plays by British and Irish female playwrights. In recent months the company had a successful run of Cell, the award-winning play by Dublin playwright Paula Meehan (the American writer Pete Hamill attended the opening night).

Her romantic life, she concedes, hasn't gone as well, adding that Paddy never had to vet too many boyfriends. "I think the thing of Americans wanting to go out with Irish people more applies to American women and Irish men," she tells me. "I think men think of me as a character -- I'm that way as an actor and in life."

Could it be that no man has ever quite lived up to Daddy? She doesn't go this far (I get the feeling Daddy himself might, however) but from speaking to them I can foresee a time when the Moloneys are living less than an ocean apart. "New York is not a city I'd want to grow old in," Aedin tells me. "Unless I had an amazing apartment I might move back home." Paddy himself can only smile at this prospect. "It would be great to have her nearer."

Fallen Angel Theatre Company was proud to be part of the 1st Irish 2009, New York's annual festival of Irish theatre which finished on October 4 at venues across New York. www.fallenangeltheatre.org

- Andrea Smith

Sunday Independent