For the past six years, Caroline Morahan has been the beaming public face of Off the Rails. She's the former journalist who took her responsibility to lead Irish women to glamour very seriously indeed.

Her reputation for having a savvy awareness of the marketability of her public image has led to snide references in the media to "Brand Morahan". But Caroline must be aware that fashion and Off the Rails have always been the very core of that brand. With the show now changing format and faces, she has finally waved goodbye to her long association with makeovers and wardrobe tips. Which inevitably begs the question: is Ireland's most famous style maven all dressed up with nowhere to go?

Meeting me in the new Radisson Hotel in Golden Lane, Caroline is actually unusually dressed down -- it is only 11am and she has come straight from home where she has been doing a radio interview by phone -- but she is, as always, irrepressibly upbeat.

There are a few projects in the pipeline that seem to suggest her television career is still alive and kicking, but it occurs to me that if it didn't work out, she could probably make a very successful career as a life coach. She has the insistent positivity and emphatic speech rhythms of a motivational speaker. Her honed personal philosophy, she explains, allows her to consider every eventuality, even difficult ones, as an opportunity. I ask if there was any anxiety associated with leaving the show that had been her mainstay for so long?

She looks utterly sanguine. "At the six-year point," she says, "I've kind of cooked it to perfection in my own heart. I was very involved with viewers' comments and things that came in, and I really tried to give them what they wanted. And take on board and progress and develop, and I kind of felt I had gone as far as I could. So it was kind of nice for me not to make the decision to jump ship, to pursue something else."

She is unafraid, she insists, of the prospect of venturing out into the media job market. Much has been made of the fact that fellow Off the Rails presenter Pamela Flood was immediately absorbed back into the RTE schedules with her show, Marry Me, but Caroline has an eclectic clutchful of projects in the offing. She has just finished her turn in I Keano -- the first bit of professional acting she has done since getting a part in Fair City when she was just 15, and an experience she raves about with the unbridled enthusiasm of an evangelist.

"Acting has been a real love of mine since I was four, probably, or younger," she says.

"At the crux, when you are finishing school and deciding where you are going to go, I just didn't have the confidence to pursue acting full-time. But I have always felt a huge draw to it. To a large degree, I used it on television. In interview situations, generally whenever you see me on screen, I'm talking to a wall. There's one camera, and . . . [the interviewee] is not the professional, so they can't box a reaction and open it up five minutes later. I can laugh, cry, look dazed, whatever needs to happen after they've left. So it used to make my various directors laugh, going: 'You're freaking me out.' But it was completely normal to me. And then, when I joined the cast of I Keano, I went: 'God, here are people and it's normal for them too.' And it was kind of like a homecoming of sorts. Like I wasn't just the drama bunny in the corner, I was with like-minded people."

As well as that, she's a judge on the talent show Class Act, a role that she will be later reprising on It's My Show on the Den, where she will be mentor to young, aspiring TV presenters. For August, she'll be presenting the breakfast slot on 2FM. And after that, she says with relish, comes a time to reflect on what she really wants to do and the next step. She's not afraid of the uncertainty, she insists, having always been something of a lone ranger where her career is concerned.

"I think this need for security and what's coming next is a fundamentally flawed concept in life," she says. "You can have the most secure job and the rug can come out from under it."

Thinking only as far as the job in hand suits her, she says. Her guiding principle in every job she does is based on whether it has meaning and value -- and autonomy is essential to having the freedom to make those judgements.

"My career decisions aren't really about having my mush omnipresent on television. It's about doing things that I think are going to be of benefit, that people are going to really enjoy and that'll be positive; and things that fit in with who I am and where I am at the time. A freelance person generally doesn't want to say no to work," she goes on, "but I think you have to."

The same undaunted approach, she insists, defined her first job in journalism, and helped to launch her television career. "When I started in newspapers, they were like: 'Here's your chair, here is your desk,' and I said: 'No, I don't want that.' And they were like: 'Are you crazy?' But it was like: 'No, I want to do my own thing, I don't want someone to say, 'This is what you are writing, this is how you are writing it.' There were areas I didn't want to be covering."

Caroline's interview patter runs as smoothly as a well-oiled machine, and she seems equally at ease answering questions as she is guiding viewers and contributors to tasteful wardrobe choices on TV. She clearly understands her niche and how to sell it. She has her knowable, approachable Irish side -- "I don't go around the place in a persona. I'm just living my life and I am an ordinary person, the same as anyone else" -- along with a dose of aspirational high glamour. While she resists the title of role model, she has always sold a sort of everywoman fashion dream.

"I'm always aware of the trickle-down effect of everything that I do. The position I have been in for the past number of years as half of the presenting force of the fashion programme that beams into 400,000 houses every week; that's a unique position to be in to communicate a positive message. And I think that every person working in media has a responsibility to make sure their message is a good one."

How does the girl who values positivity above all other virtues react, then, when she is lampooned by the press? Recently, she has been mocked for comparing herself to Angelina Jolie and, among other things, for arriving at an interview and insisting that the journalist in question delete her mobile phone number then and there.

"I could be naive here, but some of them I actually feel sorry for," she says of the people involved in criticising her in print. "I feel that they've got a gun to their head, and are being told, 'You write this or I'll get someone else to write it.' Others, I think, actually are a bit in trouble and a bit vindictive. And it's unfortunate that they've been given that pulpit to spout nasty things from. Because I really don't think anyone benefits from reading nasty things. But when somebody's career is muckraking, basically, it can't be very good for them. They can't feel very good in themselves, and I'm sure that an epiphany will kick in at some point. Who knows if it will be this lifetime. So I kind of remove myself from it. When it started to happen that people would make comments . . . very quickly I adjusted to that because my mum said to me: 'Well Caroline, if you continue working in this business, the more successful you get the more nasty things are going to be written about you.' That is the equation. She said: 'Really, it's a very big compliment to you, because obviously they think you are worthy of commenting on.'"

Mostly, though, she insists that the stuff that is written about her, whether good or bad, doesn't penetrate.

"I can't be going around getting a hernia every time I open a paper because another false sentence is put out there. Anyone who I meet, I hope, or work with, sees who I am and if they come away with a negative view of me, it's because they've got an issue themselves. I'm out there doing my best."

A similar defiance has served her well when under the scrutiny of the fashion press. Caroline is well known for occasional wardrobe clangers.

"With regard to the catty news thing," she says, having clearly given this some thought, "it astonishes me that I've been given this label of being like a crazy, zany dresser. I wore one mental thing three years ago, and repeatedly it's like, 'There she is again.' It astonishes me the lack of imagination. I just think it's hilarious . . .

"I've been at things where people have been name checked for looking beautiful on the night, and I thought they looked like a pelican exploded in a blender. It's quite bizarre. I've seen best-dressed lists and worst-dressed lists and I've not been able to differentiate which is supposed to be which. It's nonsensical. That's another reason why I don't identify with that. They don't know what they are talking about."

Perhaps it is this kind of strident confidence that has contributed to her tricky public image. Women demand vulnerability from other women. Along with bitching and complaining about men, drawing attention to one's own weaknesses is part of our convoluted bonding process. But Caroline doesn't feel the need for false modesty. When she has done things she is proud of, she doesn't bother with the social sweetener of trying to play them down. Behind the girlishness, the high heels and the clothes obsession, is a decidedly alpha woman, lacking that classic feminine trait of needing approval all the time.

"If somebody has a cap on their head, 'Caroline Morahan is up on herself, this that and the other', that's all they are going to see. No matter what I say or do, they've made their decision and that's fine, I'll leave them to it. I'm not out to have everyone appreciate me," she says.

She has admitted to being in a relationship at the moment, but will say no more.

"It's not fair to the other person, they didn't sign up for that."

Is forming a relationship harder when you are a celebrity?

"I don't think so . . . I have friends who constantly have male attention or whatever, and that's lovely. I wouldn't be like that. People aren't coming over to me all the time or whatever. But in the past, I can very quickly see what somebody is at, where their interest is and where they are going with it. So I can immediately discount it.

"I can tell by looking at them, that their past romances have included models, TV presenters. And it is, 'Who is the person?' and 'What do they look like?' and that's really all that matters. I've no interest in that, frankly. Sometimes you see someone and you go: 'Ah you should give them a chance, or whatever,' but my stomach voice will always have a backing track and it will get louder if it needs to, or fade away if it doesn't."

Though she's notoriously private, her recent revelation in the Sunday Independent of the hardest thing she has ever had to deal with -- the loss of her younger brother James to polycystic kidney disease -- provides some extra insight into what motivates this self-determining young woman. James died when he was just six years old after a transplant operation for which the family moved to the UK. His attitude, always positive and lacking in self-pity, was to have a profound effect on his big sister and defines her way of engaging with the world personally and professionally.

Having experienced such emotional turmoil at such a young age, it's easy for Caroline not to lose a sense of perspective about what is important, even when faced with criticisms and career upheavals.

She says of her brother's death: "Going through something like that, and having someone like that looking out for me as well -- because, I mean, he is 100 per cent looking out for me all of the time -- I think it also makes you realise, don't sweat the small things. Who cares if someone doesn't like me when I am wearing pink?"

- Julia Molony