Michael O'Leary (50 page)

His presentation over, the politicians probed for weaknesses. Róisín Shorthall, transport spokeswoman for the Labour Party, wanted to know about Ryanair's refund policy. O'Leary explained that Ryanair kept all of the money paid by customers, including airport charges, when a trip was cancelled. Power took exception to this, saying he did not see how Ryanair could keep money supposed to be destined for airport authorities or insurance authorities. ‘There is a misunderstanding here,' O'Leary said. ‘We do not take money – passengers give it to us voluntarily. This could not be any clearer.'

Soon the subject turned to Aer Rianta, which was in line for its break-up. ‘Aer Rianta. Is it possible for the company to be run better?' asked O'Leary sarcastically. ‘Where do I start? Let me give an example. Aer Rianta is the Iraq of Irish tourism. It is an inefficient dictatorship.'

His audience was not amused. ‘We have never tolerated such remarks from anyone who has made a presentation to the committee,' complained Noel O'Flynn, a government TD. ‘Perhaps you would remind Mr O'Leary that he should conduct himself in a proper manner in the Houses of the Oireachtas.'

O'Leary's language soon caused further offence when he suggested that ‘if the government wants to develop its spatial strategy [a plan to spread development around Ireland, away from Dublin], it should fly the buggers straight to Shannon'.

‘Mr O'Leary's language is unparliamentary,' the committee chairman said.

‘Sorry, what did I say?' O'Leary replied, appearing genuinely puzzled.

‘You used the word “buggers”,' came the reply.

‘That is a term of endearment in Mullingar,' O'Leary responded.

The following day it was O'Leary's use of the word ‘bugger' which attracted most coverage, followed by his confident assertion that Ryanair would be the world's largest airline by 2005. The
Irish Independent
ran a satirical piece headlined ‘Poor little rich Mick with no friends'. The article began:

Pity poor rich boy Michael O'Leary – he has everything money can buy but no friends. At times, the chief executive of Ryanair sounded like the kid with all the new toys but nobody to play with…He sat before the transport committee yesterday like a bold lad at a boarding school carpeted by the prefects for trousering the takings of the tuck shop. But as the class show-off, Mick O'Leary was determined to put on a performance and he didn't disappoint his inquisitors…

For O'Leary it was a minor victory. He had had an opportunity to place on public record Ryanair's success, even if his language and demeanour caused more discussion than the fact that Ireland had produced Europe's most successful airline. The next day, however, his taxi returned to the headlines, and this time O'Leary had to choose contrition over aggression when it was revealed that he had been caught speeding. His driver was ill, so O'Leary had taken the wheel himself. When he appeared in court, the judge heard that O'Leary had overtaken fifteen cars on a blind bend, prompting two witnesses to call the police on the emergency 999 number.

Convicted and fined, O'Leary managed to keep his driving licence because he had been ‘courteous' to Gardai. Uncharacteristically subdued at the outcome, O'Leary steered clear of his normal self-promotion. ‘I'm very sorry,' he said. ‘I feel the court was very fair, the judge was very fair, the guards were very fair and the two people who gave evidence were very fair.'

Contrition was a temporary affliction. By the end of April O'Leary was at war with Ireland's department of transport because he refused to cooperate with procedures the government had put in
place to reduce the risk of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). A highly contagious and potentially deadly virus, SARS had first emerged in China in November 2002 and was being billed as a major threat to aviation as governments took measures to prevent its spread. Although fatalities were few, it had provoked a global media storm that threatened to scupper the aviation industry's slow recovery from the 11 September attacks – a recovery already imperilled by the invasion of Iraq by United States and British forces. O'Leary insisted Ryanair could weather the storm, but the market disagreed and Ryanair's shares fell along with other airline stocks, encouraged downwards by British Airways claims that SARS had contributed to its low passenger numbers the previous month.

The Irish government had responded to the epidemic by requiring airlines to broadcast a 48-second SARS alert to passengers and to distribute leaflets. Hardly onerous, but O'Leary was unimpressed and determined to prevent what he saw as a low-risk disease spreading panic among European air travellers. On 29 April he wrote to John Brown at the Airports Division of the department of transport.

Your letter dated 25 April (which we received by fax at 17.00 hrs on Friday) to all airlines and their handling agents was both unnecessary and ridiculously disproportionate.

At a time when Irish tourism is trying to fend off the adverse effects of the war in Iraq and the international economic downturn we are now to be hindered by a bunch of incompetent civil servants designing irresponsible and unnecessary leaflets/passenger announcements solely to appear to the local media like you are actually doing something, instead of sensibly analysing and addressing the actual threat to Ireland or Irish people from SARS in a proportionate and realistic fashion.

The (non-existent) threat to Ireland from SARS is a media invention which is in danger of running riot because of the absence of any common-sense response from panicked civil servants and spineless politicians…More people in Europe got killed falling off barstools this weekend than got killed from SARS. What's next, leaflets on Irish
aircraft to warn visitors about the threat of Legionnaires' Disease in Irish hospitals? Why don't you get a grip of yourselves?

O'Leary made it clear that his airline would not be cooperating with the department's demands. When Micheal Martin, the health minister, intervened on the side of the transport department and appealed for cooperation, O'Leary's response was withering.

We would appreciate it if, the next time the Department of Transport wants to panic and pander to some manufactured media controversy in order to threaten even further international confidence in the Irish tourism industry, you might consider actually consulting with one or two of the larger airline/ferry operators and then put in place proportionate and realistic measures that bear some relationship to the magnitude of the threat to the health and safety of our passengers, our staff and the population of this country. I have never read such a ridiculous, spineless, load of nonsense.

Unloved by the media and feared by the establishment, O'Leary was nonetheless a celebrity. His public persona was now well established, but little was known about his private life. In April an Irish journalist decided to exploit the fact that O'Leary's house outside Mullingar was designated a ‘heritage home', which meant it was open to the public on a certain number of days each year – a concession which allowed the owner tax breaks on the costs of maintaining the house. When O'Leary had bought Gigginstown in 1993, he had been ‘to the pin of his collar' to pay for it. The house needed to be renovated and modernized, so O'Leary had signed up to the heritage scheme. ‘I had spent a couple of hundred thousand that I really didn't have doing it up,' he says. ‘And so the tax relief was very important to me at the time.'

Gigginstown remained open to the public in 2003 because the tax relief scheme required houses to remain open for five years after the final claim. ‘People think that I pulled out of the scheme because I'm a celebrity,' O'Leary says. ‘I didn't. I pulled out of the scheme five years earlier because at that stage I thought, I want to
get married and have a family down here. It's not so much that I don't want them coming into my family home, frankly I don't much care. But it's not fair to your [future] wife and kids to have people traipsing up and down the place for three months in the summer.'

While O'Leary went through the process of withdrawing from the scheme, Liam Collins of the
Sunday Independent
decided to take a look, bringing his wife and children for the tour. Instead of bringing a photographer from the newspaper, Collins asked his wife to take pictures. ‘They went berserk at the office, and they dispatched a photographer down to take fresh pictures,' says Collins, whose visit had gone unnoticed by O'Leary.

[The photographer] arrives at the gate of Gigginstown and demands to be let in. They say, ‘You're from where?' He says, ‘The
Sunday Independent;
there was a reporter down here and he's done a piece.' ‘Oh really…'

So the next thing O'Leary gets on to the
Irish Independent
[the
Sunday Independent's
sister paper], the eejit. He rings them up to complain. Vinny Doyle, the editor, listens to O'Leary, puts the phone down and says, ‘That's a great idea, get our reporter down there.' So one of the girls was sent down and they wouldn't let her in.

When O'Leary finally got through to Collins's editor, he made much of the invasion into his privacy and the potential for the article to tip off burglars. ‘Then he started sending solicitor's letters, he sent about three, saying not to publish it, that we were putting him in danger,' says Collins. ‘As if. I mean, if you were any way intelligent you'd know where he lives.'

Despite O'Leary's entreaties, the article was published on 13 April. ‘There is nothing to indicate that this is the entrance to Gigginstown House, home of Michael O'Leary – Ireland's wealthiest bachelor,' Collins began.

But you can guess by the pristine state of the stone walls and the extended gate lodge that it isn't the seat of some decrepit old Anglo-Irish squire.
Gigginstown is not a big house. In fact, it's rather small, but perfectly proportioned. But [O'Leary] is currently extending it to at least twice the size. There is a long columned swimming pool facing on to the walled garden and, on the other side, suites of bedrooms and offices. A tall crane hangs incongruously over the house as workmen toil in the sunshine…

Collins then provided his readers with a detailed description of the interior of the house. ‘You ascend the steps and pass through a stone porch and into the hallway, where dozens of portraits soar up the stairway towards a glass dome,' Collins wrote.

Michael O'Leary fills his walls with old portraits in much the same way as he packs his Ryanair flights with cut-price travellers. In big ornate gilt frames, blue bloods from the 17th and 18th century soar towards the beautifully corniced ceilings…As befits a stud farm owner of note, virtually the only other paintings on his walls are of horses. Derby winners, famous sires and old nags, whose names are now long forgotten, jostle for space on his elegantly papered walls. The room on the left-hand side of the hallway is the dining room and it goes on into a second reception room. Neither is very large, but the ceilings are high and there are lovely Waterford chandeliers and glassware by Louise Kennedy. An Ascot Gold Cup from the 1840s is one of the trophies on a side table.

The atmosphere is slightly spoiled by a large television and video, with horse videos and a cassette of
Ben Hur.
Among the CDs is Burt Bacharach. And beside it the
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
game…Across the hall is another reception room filled with more paintings. The rooms are rather impersonal. It's like walking through a miniature version of the National Gallery in Dublin.

Behind this is Michael O'Leary's study, complete with desk and computer. One side is lined with old bound volumes, including the
Annals of the Four Masters,
while in the far corner his modern bookshelves are crowded with business tomes and biographies of, among others, Churchill. In the four downstairs rooms there are only two personal photographs – one of him as a member of a golfing team and the other with a female friend on a skiing holiday. There are a few tacky Ryanair mementoes, but they are hardly noticeable…

O'Leary was not happy. Despite his willingness to prostitute himself for the Ryanair brand, he drew a clear distinction between his public and private lives. He believed he could court the media for business purposes, but turn them away when he decided that he wanted to retreat.

After a relatively brief courtship – they had met a year earlier at the wedding of Shane Ryan, Tony Ryan's youngest son – O'Leary announced that he was engaged to Anita Farrell, a banker who had some experience of the aviation market.

O'Leary understood that the media interest would be intense. ‘You cannot on the one hand court publicity as I do for Ryanair and then on the other hand say, “Oh, I want to be alone,”' he says. The attention was ‘a pain in the arse', but also ‘a small price to pay'.

It was an opportunity for the media to peek behind O'Leary's image of a committed, if demonic, businessman and glimpse the man. The tabloids announced that O'Leary was ‘head over heels in love' and that he had showered his fiancee with presents – including a racehorse. The
Daily Mirror
proclaimed that the wedding was ‘not to be a no frills affair' and the
Sunday Independent
said it would be ‘the grandest event'. The papers were desperate for photographs of Farrell, with the
Mirror
appealing to its readers for help. Background details on the future Mrs O'Leary were thin on the ground. Anita Farrell was an understated woman – attractive, intelligent and single. She also knew the airline business, working in the aviation leasing division of Citigroup, the giant American financial institution, from its offices in Dublin's Financial Services Centre, and she liked horses, another O'Leary passion. In the past she had worked with Andrew Lobbenberg, the London stockbroker whose critical analysis of Ryanair had caused a share-price wobble.