What’s that I’m hearing? ‘Last call for Mr O’Leary’?

ON their way out of the Ryanair AGM on Thursday, several shareholders made a point of expressing their support for Michael O’Leary. They still believed he was the man to head the company, they said, he WAS Ryanair, simple as.

He had learned some badly needed lessons from the woeful handling of the cancellations fiasco, it was indeed a dreadful mess, but now it was time to move on.

So, nothing to see here, folks, all one big happy family, nobody’s nibbling on the leader’s bum and, as he said himself, his head won’t roll. This time, at least.

Nobody put it quite like that, of course, nobody suggested that O’Leary’s days as the boss of the airline were numbered.

Nobody said they’d lost confidence in him – on the contrary, they were keen to stress how much they wanted him to stay at the helm.

Almost too keen. Because the very fact that some shareholders felt the need to defend their hero marks a subtle shift that won’t have been lost on a man as sharp and wily as Michael O’Leary.

There was a time, after all, when Ryanair shareholders revelled in the knowledge that they had the best chief executive in the business, in any business.

In the depths of recession, there were calls to have him run the country, never mind an airline.

He was the CEO whom every other company envied, the brilliant strategist, the ruthless manager, the ‘take no prisoners’ chief whose airline soared smoothly through the worst of the economic turbulence.

He could do what he liked, say what he liked, even to the point of insulting his customers, and business just got boomier.

During the ash cloud crisis in 2010, he told carping passengers, ‘What part of “no refunds” do you not understand – f*** off!’ He threatened to charge obese fliers for two seats, claiming that his normal-sized passengers were in favour of the plan – in fact, he said, people didn’t just want the fatties charged extra, they wanted them tortured too.

He bought a taxi licence so that his car could use the bus lane, and we groundlings doffed our hats in awe.

And then he went and made an almighty dog’s dinner of a problem that never needed to become a drama. Rahm Emanuel, US President Obama’s chief of staff and an equally straight-talking, shoot-from-the-hip sort of chap, famously warned against ‘letting a serious crisis go to waste’. A crisis, he said, was ‘an opportunity to do things you couldn’t do before’. The forced cancellations, due to scheduling and rostering issues, was an opportunity to do something that Ryanair had never done before: proper, proactive, empathic customer relations.

Handled with a shred of consideration and human insight, this issue could have been a public relations triumph for the airline, rather than a disaster that wiped €1.4billion off the company’s share market value and led to mutterings about O’Leary’s future.

All it would have taken was an announcement, a fortnight in advance, of the coming cancellations, rather than those last-minute emails.

A freephone helpline, a friendly voice to steer confused passengers through their options, a voucher for an on-board drink, a 20% discount off your next Ryanair flight – it would have been so easy to appease those 315,000 inconvenienced customers, and win their loyalty into the bargain.

WE ALL get it: things go wrong, companies mess up. The difference between calm and chaos, though, is what happens next. Michael O’Leary is a business genius, no question, and we may never see his like in Irish business again.

But instances like this suggest he may be a wartime general, skilled at fighting battles and defeating foes, rather than the cool, steady steward that peacetime problems require – a fighter pilot, not a Chesley Sullenberger.

Not every disgruntled passenger is the enemy, and ‘f*** off’ is not a single transferrable response to all customer complaints.

Belatedly, Ryanair has grasped the extent of this crisis and will pay dearly to rectify it.

And Michael O’Leary has survived to fight another day, with confidence votes of his shareholders ringing queasily in his ears.

Because, as a couple of former Garda Commissioners could tell him, it’s when your stakeholders start to express their confidence that you should start to worry.