The weather girl

It’s an occupational hazard. People on the street are not shy about letting her know when she’s looking less than her best – but TG4 weather presenter and Pop4 host, Sinéad Ní Loideain, takes this criticism in her stride.

“We all have our up and down days,” she laughs, “and I have big, mad, curly hair! I call it my bed-head, it’s fresh out of bed hair and that’s what I wear off-screen.”
On-air or off, this genuine Galway girl is adamant that confidence is the most important accessory in a girl’s wardrobe. “It doesn’t really matter what you wear,” she says, “if you’re confident, it’ll shine through.”
She describes her personal style as “a bit of everything thrown together.”
“I like to keep it simple,” she explains, “Tailored and fitted, nice bright colours and a lot of jeans.”
Sinéad is by no means a slave to the latest fashions, choosing instead to incorporate aspects that suit her – and ignore the rest.
“I’m not gonna get into a pair of painted-on jeans for the sake of fashion!” she laughs.
Instead, she gets her fashion highs from participating in that noble ancient sport – bargain hunting. Indeed Sinéad seems to be something of an expert in this field, revealing that her most expensive purchase to date is a jacket that was reduced to !90. In order to get such impressive results, she first stalks her prey. “I might price jackets in Karen Millen or Coast and wait till they come down in a sale,” she reveals, “and then I’d get them for about 80 or 90 quid.”
Anyone who has experienced the gut-wrenching feeling of seeing the dress you paid !80 for yesterday reduced by 70% today will appreciate Sinead’s innate shopping talents. She shops and dies by the motto: “It will come down” – much to the chagrin of her friends.
“My friends are always giving out to me! They’re always going ‘Oh I like that, it’s on sale, I should get it’” But Sinéad says she urges them to show restraint, predicting that the price is bound to come down. “They go, ‘Oh my god Sinéad, it’s !10, it’s not coming down anymore!’,” she laughs. Her advice to all shopping addicts is “Don’t be silly, it will come down.”
Sinéad’s cut-price shoes from high-street shop Schuh take pride of place in her wardrobe, but they don’t get much exposure to the elements.
“I don’t wear them because they’re too hard to walk in, but they look really good in my room.”
What’s her biggest fashion faux pas? Well, she’d hate to be caught wearing a ‘big woolly jacket’ when it’s sunny outside (“They’d say I wasn’t keeping up with the weather!”). Apart from that, The Ghosts of ‘90s Fashion Past continue to haunt her. “Anything I wore between 1990 and 1997 was bad, bad, bad. Let’s not go there!”
Her fashion icon is Marilyn Monroe, a fellow-blonde. “She was a bit crazy, so she got away with a lot. If we could all be like her, I think it’d be great.”
And what of juicy rumours in a Sunday newspaper that she would strip for a lad’s mag? “I didn’t actually say that,” she says bemused. Sadly for her avid male admirers, I can confirm that there’s no chance of a naked Irish language weather forecast in the near future, with Sinéad insisting that she’ll leave that to her more tanned European counterparts.
And does Sinéad get annoyed about being tarred with the ‘TG4 Weather Babe’ brush? “Oh god!” she giggles, “No, because I wouldn’t think of myself like that, not with my fresh out of bed hair – but as long as it’s all good stuff they’re saying, I don’t mind.”