With O’Leary in the grave? Only a fool would write off this genius
ALL too often people see victory as something of an anti-climax if they cannot publicly mock the loser. And last week, too many trade unionists wanted to see Michael O’Leary publicly branded the William Martin Murphy for a new millennium.
The civic humiliation of O’Leary seemed more satisfying for them than trade unions winning the right to negotiate with Ryanair.
I have a long history with Ryanair: I first reported on the airline in the ‘You’ magazine of this newspaper group soon after both were launched in the 1980s.
Back then Aer Lingus and British Airways came close to a criminal conspiracy charging the most expensive airfares in the world on the world’s busiest route, Dublin/London.
Back then, Ryanair was like a High School musical: the cabin crew were the prettiest girls from posh convent schools and they had a risqué nickname: ‘Rhinos’.
Tony Ryan owned some 90% of the airline that started with one plane in 1985; it lost IR£7.5m (US$ 11m) in 1988.
PJ McGoldrick was the chief executive then and Michael O’Leary, pictured right, an ambitious young accountant not long out of the exclusive Clongowes Wood College in Kildare. Tony Ryan lodged a further IR£20m to save the airline in 1989.
I rarely travelled with Ryanair preferring the comfort and dependability of more established and expensive airlines to the take-it-or-leave-it attitude that came with the low fares. Yet the airline that O’Leary built is now one of the world’s most successful, its shareholders have enjoyed prosperity from their investment and Irish governments take pride in its success.
Along the way, Michael O’Leary was the country’s most famous entrepreneur and one of the world’s most innovative managers. And he refused to become a tax exile and pays all of his due taxes in Ireland.
O’Leary is also instinctively mischievous, a man whose most telling quote was: ‘Anyone who looks like (they are) sleeping, we wake them up and sell them things.’
Unprecedented success made change inevitable and with a global shortage of pilots, O’Leary looked like King Canute recently trying to repel the unions from boarding Ryanair. Yet he changed his mind when organisational change at Ryanair was