“I’m having the time of my life. There are days I wish I had a little more time to smell the roses, but really, I have no complaints.”

That’s Top 100 member Roma Downey speaking from her adopted hometown, Salt Lake City. So what’s a nice girl originally from the Bogside in Co. Derry doing in Utah, of all places? There’s an excellent explanation for the unusual geographical shift — her huge hit TV show is filmed there.

Roma stars in the CBS series, Touched By An Angel, which is enjoying an amazing surge in the all-important Nielsen ratings in this, its third season on the air. Broadcast on Sunday nights at 8 p.m., Angel, with Roma in the starring role as Monica, has not only roped out all its Sunday cempetition, it’s given other venerable shows such as Seinfeld and E.R. a run for their advertising dollars as well.

“It’s the little train that could,” she says of the vehicle that’s driven her career to new heights. “it’s been phenomenal, and now we’re beating all lite big ones.”

Roma’s Monica is an angel who each week provides divine guidance to earthlings facing crossroads in their lives. Her heavenly mentor is played by Della Reese, and Monica’s joy comes from creating opportunities for miracles to happen for those she becomes involved with.

Sounds a little too sugary sweet? That’s the way it’s supposed to be. Angel sets out to prove that not all ratings winners have to emulate the sex and violence contained in so many top TV shows.

“I think there was a hole in television programming that the show has managed to fill,” Downey replies when asked why Angel has been blessed with success. “It’s a show that allows mothers to sit down with their children and not feel they have to keep their finger on the remote control.”

Angel has also provided Roma an opportunity to show that she’s more than just a pretty face. While she’s had her share of meaty roles in the past — among others, she portrayed Jackie Kennedy Onassis in the 1991 TV miniseries A Woman Named Jackie — Hollywood honchos, she’s found, are just as likely to zero in on the exterior package.

She explains, “So often, as an actress in this business, a lot of the roles I would be asked to read for would be for decorative purposes — they would have been to make HIM look good, such as wife or a girlfriend or a secretary.”

Roma’s journey from the Bogside to fame and fortune in Hollywood would have seemed nearly impossible during her youth, much of which was spent without her mother, who died when Roma was 10 years old. She spent her formative years growing up in the midst of The Troubles in Northern Ireland, which didn’t exactly fill her with thoughts that she could become a star.

Not that it was all bad. The Downeys were never really touched by the hard-core discrimination inflected on other Catholic families,and when Roma looks back on those days it’s with a sense of normalcy rather than bitterness.

“Life before The Troubles as we know them I really have no memory of,” she says. “Derry is a predominantly Catholic city, so unlike the Catholics in West Belfast we probably had it slightly easier. I know that there was a lot of discrimination and I was well aware of it in our community, but as a young girl I didn’t experience it. I have memories of going shopping and being searched and getting caught up in dots. But it was just a fact of life.

“For every horror story I can recall, there’s always something to combat it. My childhood wasn’t idyllic, but I remember a lot of love in my house.”

While still a teen, Roma decided to leave Derry and pursue her love of painting at Brighton Art College in the south of England. The college also offered classes in theater studies, which she simultaneously pursued with gusto. About 18 months into the course she decided that acting rather than painting was her first love, and after leaving Brighton with a degree per her father’s wishes Roma headed to the London Drama Studio, where she won a Most Promising Student of the Year award.

From there she traveled to America, where she earned bit parts here and there and paid her dues in classic Hollywood style — with stints as a waitress, a milk delivery person, and a shoe saleswoman.

Her ethnicity proved to be a hindrance in the beginning. “Before Touched By An Angel, I would go into an audition and do an American accent, and somebody there would know that I was from Ireland and ask for me to read in my own accent. They’d tell me they loved it and say they’d be in touch, and the next thing I’d hear back from my agent that they decided to go with an American.”

Her character on Angel most definitely speaks with an Irish accent, and Roma was relieved when the show’s producers went for her natural voice. “I can’t tell you how many letters I get from people who say they discovered the show when they were channel surfing and they heard my accent They say they stopped in their tracks and stayed tuned because of it.”

Filming in Salt Lake City is grueling work, but Roma’s not complaining. She and her husband, producer David Anspaugh, recently purchased a house surrounded by Utah’s famed ski mountains, but Salt Lake City isn’t the place Roma calls “home.” That distinction is reserved for Ireland.

Roma recently purchased a plot of land in Donegal and hopes to build a summer hideaway; “I have very strong ties to home,” she says. “I go back once if not twice a year, and I really want Riley (her nine-month old daughter) to be aware of her Irish roots.”

The girl from Derry is quite content with her present circumstances, and baby Riley seems to have made her life complete. The infant and bet nanny travel to the Angel every day, and Roma admits that her career wouldn’t be possible without having her daughter close at hand.

Being a mom “is everything I hoped it would be. She’s just precious and wonderful. In some ways her birth has made things come full circle, with the death of my own mother.

“I’ve never been so exhilarated, but also never so exhausted.” But Roma quickly adds, “Things couldn’t be better.”