No sooner had one high-profile United States visitor, Donald Trump, departed Ireland’s shores, but another arrived in the person of Oprah Winfrey.

US presidents come and go, but Oprah – she’s only known by her first name – is like the late Queen Elizabeth II was when she was alive: a fixture in all the tumult and changes in society.

It’s 50 years since Oprah started out as a television reporter on a local TV station, 40 years since the start of the Oprah Winfrey Show, which was the highest-rated daytime talkshow in the US for 25 years straight. At its peak, it was showing in 135 countries.

Now aged 72, Oprah was introduced by interviewer David Meade at Dublin’s 3Arena as “the most powerful woman in the world”. Hyperbole perhaps, but few women in the world have been so famous for so long.

She never set foot in Ireland before this weekend. “It took me too long to get here,” she acknowledged to the 8,000 people at the 3Arena who came to see her in an event organised by the Pendulum Summit and Front Row Speakers.

She tried drinking Guinness with her friend Gayle King, a renowned TV presenter in her own right, in Dublin’s Doheny and Nesbitt’s pub when she got to Ireland, but admitted she found the bitterness an “acquired taste”.

Among those in the audience were the novelist Claire Keegan. Her novel, Small Things Like These, was chosen by Oprah for her prestigious book club in 2024.

Oprah spoke for an hour-and-a-half in which she expounded on themes that she has been exploring for decades: self-expression, overcoming self-doubt, expressing empathy for others and trusting one’s instincts.

As a skilful communicator, she is adept at melding the modern language of self-help with the verbal fluency of a Bible preacher.

We’re all special, she says. The chances of that egg hitting that sperm and creating us are infinitesimally small, and smaller still for her. Her parents, she revealed, had never married and had sex a single time. “I didn’t know that,” Meade said, rather startled.

She continued by stating that everybody was called to do something in life whether that calling came from God or the universe. “What is the real worth that you have come to do,” she asked rhetorically.

Her central message is that you can realise the purpose of your life no matter how unfulfilled you feel in that moment.

She became as successful as she has done because she paid attention to the “whispers – God is silence. He doesn’t make a lot of noise. You will only hear it when you are silent. When you follow that voice, you can’t go wrong. Yours is always the right answer.”

Oprah said it was her own instincts not to use her show to humiliate guests even if it cost her ratings. She did it once at the start of the Oprah Winfrey Show when a man appeared with his wife and mistress – and the mistress revealed live on air that she was pregnant. “The worst thing you could do to anybody is to humiliate them,” Oprah said.

She vowed she would not turn her daytime chatshow into a human zoo.

The goal of everybody is to reach the “highest, truest expression of yourself as a human being – how do I keep rising in my life?”

She spoke at length about lessons learned from getting a role on the 1985 film The Color Purple without having any acting experience.

She had hoped and prayed and given up getting a role in the film. She decided to surrender her ambition and let it go, having assumed it would go to a more experienced actress.

“The second I had the feeling that I’m going to be okay not getting this role, I got a phone call from [director] Steven Spielberg offering me the part”.

As a woman who struggled with her weight all her life, Oprah told the audience how a weight-loss medication, the GLP-1 agonist, has worked for her making her feel better at 72 than she did at 32.

“The GLP-1s have been miraculous in my life and changed things for me. The moment I went on GLP-1s, the food noises in my head stopped,” she said.

What message would she like to leave her audience with, Meade asked her.

“There is a life force that wanted you to be here. What is your dream, God’s dream, the universe’s dream for you?” she said.