Pippa O’Connor Ormond has admitted that she felt like she was "washed up" after having her first child and her modelling career collapsed.
The businesswoman and social media personality is one of the guests on the season two opener of Angela Scanlon’s Ask Me Anything, along with James Nesbit and Tommy Bowe.
The show will be broadcast tonight (Saturday) at 9.45pm on RTÉ One.
O’Connor, who has three children - Ollie (9), Louis (6) and Billy who is 11 months - with her husband Brian Ormond, also recalled that she was written off as "just a model" at an earlier stage in her career.
She told Angela:""When I started, I literally had no other work, and when I stopped modeling and had my first child, I was only 28 or 29 at the time and I was getting a lot of, ‘what are you going to do now?’"
"I had so many people say that ‘you’re going to be a mum now, you can’t be a model’, so that panicked me a little bit, so it was a real case of sink or swim.
"It started before I had Ollie, I would have been working a lot back in the day in the Celtic tiger times and then I got pregnant, and it went from twice a fortnight to once a month the phone ringing and then maybe some months nothing and I started to panic.
"I felt like I was washed up and I wasn’t even 30 and I hated that idea, that I was relying on someone else to call me to work and I hated not having any sense of security."
O’Connor subsequently started her own jeans brand called Poco which has become successful, and she also released her first book in 2016, Simple Tips to Live Beautifully.
"So, I just got my teeth into wanting to start my own brand and since that day I said this is just what I’m going to do. I think sometimes when you have nothing to lose you just go for it," she said.
"Even now I play my cards close to my chest and I’ve learned over the years not to get too excited about things too quickly whereas before I would have been very green and innocent.
"I feel lucky that it’s a family business, my sister works in the business so it’s in the family, but I like that, because you can rely on your family, and they have your back."
