Like many of us, Michelle Visage sat through the recent Grammys with a knot of growing fury in her belly. Though lip service was paid to the Time’s Up movement on the night, the music industry shindig nonetheless proved to be one big fat celebration of the status quo. Sting sang with Shaggy. Bruno Mars won album of the year. Lorde who had in fact released the best record of 2017, was not invited to perform on her own.

“I wasn’t surprised at all, it’s so predictable for this country,” fumes Visage, radio host, reality TV judge and, as of this month, adjudicator on new TV3 song and dance blockbuster, Ireland’s Got Talent. “This is why people are getting mad and not tolerating it any more. That time is years gone by. We should not be tolerating it now. Unfortunately it made absolute sense that it would be like that.”

Visage, who has achieved an international fanbase by dint of her judge’s role on RuPaul’s Drag Race, is an avowed opponent of Donald Trump and all for which he stands. So it was a treat to get out of the United States for several weeks late last year and film Ireland’s Got Talent. With an ocean between them, the pain of knowing Trump was in the White House chomping down happy meals was somewhat diminished.

The series is the latest attempt by Irish television to adapt an international reality show to local tastes. It does better than most, with judges Visage, Louis Walsh, Jason Byrne and Denise van Outen sharing genuine chemistry while the contestants present the standard grab-bag of singers, strivers and sob stories (if you make it through the first episode without tearing up a tad you are obviously a heartless creature).

Amid the razzmatazz. Visage is an agreeably feisty presence – a straight talker but not above breaking into tears when a perfumer tugs her heartstrings.

“I knew Louis beforehand,” she says. “We had met and clicked straight away. We have a very special relationship. I love my Louis. He went in to TV3 and said, ‘I want you to do this…They listened… he is King Louis after all.”

She isn’t afraid to punch hard, but is no Simon Cowell clone and is as likely to flatter as to twist the sharp pointy object.

“I’m not going to be somebody I’m not,” she insists. “People wouldn’t believe it. Everything I do is from the heart. I don’t feel I have to change who I am. With Ireland’s Got Talent, I’m judging a lot of different things of which I have experience. I sing, I perform… the context is very different from RuPaul, in which I am judging drag queens.”

Of Irish-American heritage, Visage has been to Ireland on multiple occasions with the Drag Race live shows and feels a genuine affinity.

“You guys make me laugh so hard. I call Ireland the New Jersey of the EU – you tell it like it is and are so funny. You hold nothing back. But it was also great to get out of the United States. My country is being run by an angry apricot.”

RuPaul’s Drag Race started as a niche offering on VH1. It has become a phenomenon, with flinty Visage a huge factor in its success and can now be seen in this part of the world through Comedy Central. More than ever, she maintains, it waves a banner for progressivism in the United States.

“It’s super important that Drag Race gets louder and prouder and stronger. It’s not just gay people who come to the shows. A lot of them are heterosexual or parents with children. As progressive as America is, we are so far behind when it comes to so many things. The fact that people would have an issue with the Black Lives Matter movement or LGBT rights… and people do still have an issue with it. We are still fighting - even for women’s rights… things we should not be fighting for in 2018.”

The Time’s Up movement speaks to her powerfully. She’s spent a lifetime in show business – her band The S.O.U.L. S.Y.S.T.E.M. featured, for instance, on the soundtrack to Whitney Houston’s The Bodyguard. And if she hasn’t experienced harassment in person, she knows that, as a woman, she has, in ways, been a second class citizen all her life.

“This stuff has got to stop. I worked in morning radio and was always paid less than my male counterparts – because they were male. I fought for a good 10 years before I got equal pay. People need to stand up and make it clear they won’t be taken advantage of any more.”

She was very nearly denied the opportunity to participate in RuPaul’s Drag Race, she says, because of those very prejudices.

“On season one, they offered it to me and I would have had to take two weeks off. My boss wouldn’t give it to me because they didn’t want me being associated with a gay show. If I was a man they would have just said ‘yes’, and let me go and do it. Unless I was a gay man, of course. In which case I would have been treated exactly as I was.”

Ireland’s Got Talent is on TV3 each Saturday at 7.30pm