‘Have I a sensible question?’ Duffy raged on behalf of listeners. ‘The cheek of you…’
HE’S well known for his robust media performances. But even so, Michael O’Leary’s turn on RTÉ radio’s Liveline yesterday will live long in the memory of loyal listeners.
At one point, as Mr O’Leary felt moved to ask if RTÉ’s Joe Duffy had any ‘sensible’ questions to ask, he drew down the full ire of the broadcasting veteran.
‘What do you mean by that?’ the Ballyfermot native demanded of the billionaire businessman. ‘The cheek of you…’
To be fair, the interview had got off to an invigorating start, with Montrose veteran Duffy asking Mr O’Leary to promise not to lie, recalling an interview of four or five years ago.
The former social worker addressed Mr O’Leary yesterday, saying: ‘You came on this programme four or five years ago about a group of passengers from Luton who had missed their flight and were saying it wasn’t announced and hadn’t been advertised on the board.
‘You came on and said it was completely untrue, you accused them of being liars. We received information from Luton which disproved what you said.’
Mr O’Leary said he had ‘never told a lie on Liveline,’ adding the information he had received on that occasion had been incorrect.
The RTÉ presenter went on to grill the airline boss on its seating policy, in particular the fact that many parents have found themselves separated from their children on Ryanair flights – until they pay an extra fee.
The line of inquiry prompted Mr O’Leary to ask whether he had any ‘sensible’ questions.
Mr Duffy replied: ‘What do you mean by that? The cheek of you! I’m an adult the same as you’re an adult. I went to the same college as you. I’ve the same education.
‘How dare you. “Have you a sensible question?” Do you want to rephrase that? Do you want to apologise to me for saying that?’
Later, Duffy asked Mr O’Leary in the context of the seating policy if it presented hypothetical problems: for example, families seeking one another out in the wake of an emergency situation instead of leaving the aircraft.
‘Families aren’t separated,’ Mr O’Leary said. ‘If people choose a random seat they get a random seat. In an emergency evacuation, everyone on board is ordered to get off the plane immediately. We don’t wait for someone who says, “Can I talk to my uncle?”.
‘Emergency evacuations so rarely happen [Joe], I don’t know why you are wasting your time on those examples.’
One caller, Carole, said she had flown with Ryanair ‘for years’ and that arranging for a family group to sit together was ‘never a problem’.
However, ‘the policy has changed’, Carole said, and she would think long and hard before flying with the Irish nofrills airline again. Claiming that there had been a change of policy, she added: ‘It’s time you stopped being so disingenuous.’
But Mr O’Leary said it wasn’t true that the airline’s stance had changed. He told her: ‘There’s actually 36 €2 seats on every flight and about another 64 €4 seats on every flight. Most of the passengers who are now reserving those seats do so when they make their booking. Next year we will announce our quarter results and the average fares for all of the passengers who have flown on us for the last three months will have fallen by 8%.’
He said it had been her choice not to reserve a seat on Ryanair, adding it was a ‘bit rich’ for Carole to start whingeing five months after she made her original booking.
Another caller, Sharon said she and her two sons had missed their connecting flight to France from Stansted after their flight from Dublin to London had been delayed.
Having slept at Stansted on Tuesday night, she now found herself obliged to pay £300 in a missed departure fee and to purchase new flights to Brittany at £100 per person.
She claimed that on the flight to Brittany, she had been seated separately to her two sons, who are aged 12 and six years. The ordeal had left her £900 out of pocket, she said.