Former RTÉ presenter Claire Byrne has said she is no longer ‘striving to be perfect everything anymore’.

The Newstalk host has had a whirlwind 12 months after announcing her shock departure from her RTÉ Radio 1 job after 15 years and moving to rival station, Newstalk.

But the Laois star said that while it looks like she is busy juggling trying to have a balanced life, she admits that she ‘can’t do everything’.

She told VIP Magazine: ‘I’m not striving to be the perfect everything anymore. You can’t be, and we’re all learning all of the time anyway. And I just think it is a much healthier place to be to accept that and to represent that for other women.

‘I can’t do everything. I would love to be able to be somebody who can work full time and bake cakes at the end of the day, but I cannot do that and so I don’t pretend to. And I am comfortable saying that now.’

Claire said turning 50 gave her a sense of ‘maturity and adulthood’ that she didn’t feel like she had before.

‘I don’t know if it’s a case of the minute you turn fifty something changes. But I do think that in my forties I was waiting for that confidence that people talk about to come.

‘And I’m not sure I ever got there. But certainly, when I turned fifty, I did have a sense of maturity and adulthood that I didn’t have before. Which might sound a little ridiculous because I’ve been an adult for a long time.

‘But I do think that fifty for me was a turning point in that I just feel more certain of myself, and probably more comfortable in my skin. I am keen to say it because a lot of what I see, whether it’s online or through work, is women feeling as though they’re not enough in many ways.’

Claire previously told how when she turned 50, she wanted a change in her life.

Speaking on The Late Late Show in January, she previously said: ‘Newstalk came along and said they had huge ambition, “We want to grow the audience” and I initially thought “I’m grand where I am, thank you very much” and then I thought, you know what? Why am I not meeting this challenge? They think I can do it, why don’t I?

‘So I said I’ll give it go, I’ll do it. If I had stayed here in RTÉ, I was going to be very well paid to stay here, I’ve been honest about what I was earning in RTÉ, I would have been getting a pay cut if I had stayed and let’s not make any bones of it, that was a factor but I wasn’t going to starve if I’d stayed here, I was very happy here.

‘However, did I want to try and stretch my chops a bit, did I want to push on and try something different? Yes, I always do and ultimately that was the decision I made and I’m excited to get started.’