BRENDAN O’CONNOR
Our Ryanair party
THE Slattery bus to London was no joke. No fault of the people running it, but the clue to what an ordeal it was was in the description.
You were taking the bus to London — from Cork. It generally seemed to involve an overnight, and there were times, I will admit, that we numbed ourselves with alcohol. Indeed there were times when we wondered how we had got back to the bus in the bowels of the ferry for the final leg of the journey to London. Like the time a friend and I ended up singing songs for a biker gang who, in return, fed us whiskey.
As I remember it, the bus ultimately landed in some kind of depot in an ignominious part of London where you would struggle, dazed, into the morning sunlight. A whole generation of us came to dread that journey every summer.
But there was no alternative, really. Even flush with money from busking and building sites at the end of the summer, it didn’t really make financial sense to fly home. Flying home from London was for emergency situations, like funerals.
So before we revel too much in what is being seen as the humbling of Michael O’Leary and his agreement to recognise the bearded brethren he has loathed for so many years, we should perhaps remember that we all partied.
Not only did Ryanair make it realistic for young people to start flying to London, it made Aer Lingus prices more realistic too. London became a commuter hop, instead of what felt at times like a 24-hour journey into hell.
And it wasn’t just London. Suddenly getting a cheap bolt-hole in Spain became a reality for Irish people. They could book their flights strategically in advance to go as often as they wanted for less than the price of a taxi to the airport. I know people who consider their foreign bolt-holes useless if Ryanair stops flying there.
And what about city breaks? When did Irish people ever have city breaks? When I was a kid, many people had never left the country apart, perhaps, for trips to England or Wales. Back then, people who went out ‘foreign’ regularly (unless it was to Lourdes), were regarded as quite exotic, possibly immoral and certainly, suspiciously, indulgent.
Now, thanks to a combination of circumstances, but mainly Ryanair, every second person you meet has been to Tallinn, Prague, Lisbon, Paris, Rome... not necessarily with Ryanair, but with all the other airlines that compete with Ryanair. Ordinary people can travel around Europe in a way we couldn’t have imagined before.
Ryanair has been central to changing us as people. We are outward-looking people now, who understand what Italian food should actually taste like, who understand a little bit more about how other people live and the different textures of life throughout Europe.
Indeed, it might not be fanciful to say that Ryanair has played a huge part in integrating Ireland into Europe, culturally and socially.
On a practical level, it changed the lives of Irish emigrants living in London and elsewhere. I once met a nurse in London who basically booked all her tickets once a year and essentially had a leap card for regular visits home.
The hyper-mobile kids who now use Ryanair to hop around at will, probably can’t even conceive of a time when, if you lived in London, you only came home at Christmas and for two weeks in summer.
As we had our lives changed, we didn’t much care to think about why Ryanair flights were cheap. Ryanair seemed immune to the kind of ethical dilemmas people might have had about using other businesses — where people were, for example, banned from joining unions. It was almost as if Ryanair was immune to bad publicity because its offer was so attractive.
Indeed, even as we became a more consumer rights-focused society, we kept accepting a level of customer care from Ryanair we wouldn’t have suffered anywhere else. But we kept coming back, just as O’Leary knew we would. And even if we sometimes swore ‘never again’, after seeing the worst come out in ourselves and others in the stampede to get on the plane, we knew deep inside, we would be back.
O’Leary’s charm helped a lot too. He somehow managed to turn an anti-union stance that should have turned off a lot of ethical customers into a kind of friendly banter with the bearded brethren.
In his attitude towards customers, we always knew he had the upper hand. We loved to hate him, and we loved to hate the airline that seemed cast in his image and likeness, but it got us where we wanted to go — or at least, somewhere near where we wanted to go.
O’Leary looked to be in a tough position when 28pc of his Irish pilots, mainly captains, threatened a strategically timed pre-Christmas strike. The fact that Portugal, Italy, Germany and Britain and Sweden were threatening to get involved made it worse.
While some analysts were predicting Ryanair would have contin- gency plans for a strike, it seems there weren’t. After the fiasco over cancellations earlier in the year, to ruin Christmas was the last thing O’Leary needed.
Ryanair bookings actually went up in the weeks after the cancellation fiasco — yet another example of Ryanair’s apparent immunity to the usual laws of business.
But it seemed O’Leary agreed a strike would not be ideal on top of the cancellations. So he caved in — a radical change for Ryanair, which would now accept union representation.
With talk of Ryanair turning nice and getting all customer service-y, this sounded like the most radical change ever — the knee-jerk reaction being that this could threaten the company’s whole business model, the whole business model we have all been happy to turn a blind eye to for so many years.
But did he cave in? As I write, the pilots don’t seem to believe him and want talks before they cancel Wednesday’s strike.
Worth noting too is that Ryanair already has a negotiating structure with pilots. In each of the company’s 80 bases is an Employee Representative Council, which negotiates on behalf of staff at that base.
What pilots were actually demanding on this occasion was that Ryanair would instead negotiate with a European Employee Representative Council. Unions also supported this idea. So Ryanair would have been negotiating with all its pilots united.
What O’Leary has offered is not that, but instead to deal with individual unions, as long as they agree to sub-groups involving just Ryanair pilots in each union. So Ryanair is not agreeing to deal with the EERC of united pilots, nor will it be dealing with unions in general, involving pilots from other airlines. It sounds like what Michael O’Leary offered is to deal with something similar to the local Employee Representative Councils but to allow them to operate under the umbrellas of various unions.
Presumably in doing all this, O’Leary is conscious that Ryanair pilots are quite well paid and the upside for them is limited. The real issue could be the contagion effect to lower-paid staff. But then, Ryanair has more or less indicated it is also willing to recognise cabin crew unions. The company is essentially saying it always knew this day would arrive.
But in ways it’s odd. As unions become more obsolete in the private sector, is Ryanair suddenly going back to the 1970s? O’Leary must have an angle. Does Ryanair feel it has nothing to fear from unions anymore?
Ryanair and O’Leary were clearly happy for last Friday’s concession to be seen as a humiliating climbdown, a radical change in direction. But if nothing else, O’Leary is cute, and if there is one thing he understands, it’s how to play a narrative in public and be a few steps ahead of the rest.
The plan is probably not as blatant as just putting off the strike then changing the goalposts on union recognition, but you’d have to think the pilots might be right to be suspicious of the move.
Despite the perceived mis-steps of 2017, you must wonder how weakened O’Leary and Ryanair are this weekend. We can all probably relax and prepare to look the other way for another while yet as we head off on our mini-breaks.
‘Talk of Ryanair turning nice sounded like the most radical change ever’