Free Michael O'Leary by Alan Ruddock Page A

trends before they were apparent had made GPA astonishingly profitable, and its location in Shannon airport’s business park allowed the shareholders to take tax-free dividends each year. The company had just reported profits of $25 million for 1986, and 1987’s profits were expected to almost treble.
    Under Ryan’s dominance GPA was a battleground, with little room for the faint-hearted. Each week started with an 8 a.m. meeting at Kilboy, Ryan’s farm in County Tipperary. The meetings were infamous for their bad temper. The cellar in Kilboy was the nerve centre of the operation. Filled with electronic equipment, it resembled NASA mission control, where Ryan could track the planes that he had leased and the movements of his GPA executives throughout the world and chart them onto large maps.
    Anxious to be accepted as a serious player in world business circles, Ryan collected a heavyweight board of non-executive directors, inviting high-profile businessmen and statesmen to join GPA. The company was growing so fast and was making so much money that a stock market flotation was already a possibility; big names, he believed, would ease his company’s acceptance and would enhance its burgeoning reputation. In April 1987 Ryan secured the services of a former Irish taoiseach, Dr Garret FitzGerald, who had just retired from politics. FitzGerald was joined on the board by Sir John Harvey-Jones, who had just left ICI, the chemical company, and who had chosen the GPA appointment over a position on several other higher-profile boards.
    While GPA prospered, however, Ryanair continued to struggle financially.
    â€˜I was trying to get involved in private investments,’ recalls O’Leary, ‘like the farm at Kilboy and Ryan’s property investments. [Ryan] had a huge dividend income from GPA, and I had to advise on what to do with the money.’ O’Leary had come in at a time when Ryan’s personal finances were in some disarray. Money had been lost on a variety of failed investments ranging from an Irish Sunday newspaper to a jetfoil boat service, according to O’Leary.
    Ryan had originally planned to base his new young assistant at his home in Kilboy, but that plan was abandoned because of Ryan’s growing frustration with the financial problems at Ryanair. ‘By the time I started there was a crisis at Ryanair,’ says O’Leary, ‘and I was sent in.’
    The crisis stemmed from Eugene O’Neill’s dash for growth. The young Ryanair managing director had decided to forge ahead with the airline’s expansion into regional British airports, even though this would put him on a collision course with Aer Lingus. The Irish government was happy to approve Ryanair’s expansion into the UK, but still refused to let it challenge Aer Lingus on the lucrative routes to continental Europe.
    But for Ryanair the figures didn’t stack up. Even though it wascarrying more passengers than ever, it was also losing more money than ever. O’Neill’s expansion strategy was being shot down in flames by Aer Lingus, which fought back viciously on price and by increasing flights, and Ryanair was increasingly exposed. It could not compete with Aer Lingus’s apparently bottomless pockets and instead of standing on its own feet and trading profitably on the back of its passenger growth, it was fast becoming a costly embarrassment to Ryan. He needed to find out what was going wrong and how his pet project could be salvaged. And so he turned to his new assistant.

5. Pearly Gates
    When Michael O’Leary first walked into Ryanair’s central Dublin offices at the beginning of May 1988 it was, he says, ‘like you’d arrived at the pearly gates’.
    Although the airline had lost ever-increasing amounts of money since its launch three years earlier, its lavishly furnished offices screamed success. O’Leary recalls a ‘gorgeous blonde chick at every