Free Michael O'Leary by Alan Ruddock Page B

desk’, plush carpets, beautiful furnishings, and then the pièce de résistance: the chief executive’s office, which was dominated by a ‘huge big massive table’ so large it could not be carried up the stairs; the windows had to be removed to get it in and the floor strengthened to support it. The effect was dramatic: instead of a sense of crisis, there was still a buzz of expectation. ‘The place was a shambles and yet it was still amazingly sexy,’ O’Leary says.
    The young Ryanair was living up to airline tradition. It may have been the dynamic newcomer, the upstart that would challenge the Aer Lingus–British Airways duopoly over the Irish Sea, but it was going to mount that challenge with style. When it launched new routes, it would do so in the extravagant style so beloved of airlines at the time. Commemorative crystal glasses and gold-plated letter openers engraved with the name of the route and the date of the first flight were ordered by the hundreds to hand out to staff and passengers. Champagne flowed at the launch parties as the new airline wooed the media, projecting the image of a young successful company that was going to take the industry by storm.
    It was an exciting, glamorous and chaotic place to work, a shaft of light in an Ireland that was still in the depths of economic gloom. It was also a company full of young people and run by young people. Eugene O’Neill, the chief executive, dressed sharply, courted the newspapers and projected the image of a new generation of Irish business leaders. Ebullient youth was replacing thestodgy corporate grey hairs, but it was not making any money. In its first year of operations Ryanair lost £4 million, followed by £5.5 million in 1986 and a further £7 million in 1987. The more passengers it carried, the more money it lost.
    â€˜The place was in a mess. There was no cost control. They were trying to be a me-too airline like everyone else and not really succeeding very well with it,’ O’Leary says. O’Leary’s role was to find out what was happening, and to ensure that further money did not flow into a black hole. It was a heavy responsibility for a twenty-seven-year-old with no experience of the airline industry, a man who had failed to stay the course in his chosen accountancy profession and whose only commercial success had been to turn a profit on a few corner shops. O’Leary had made no effort to study the airline industry before he walked through Ryanair’s doors for the first time. His immediate objective was to stop the airline bleeding cash, not to understand the dynamics of a global industry.
    At first, he could see no hope for Ryanair. ‘No one had a handle on the finances and money was leaking out all over the place. All Ryanair was doing was cutting 20 per cent off the fares charged by Aer Lingus and British Airways and losing loads of money.’ It took him less than a month to conclude that Ryanair could not be turned around and that it would continue to be a drain on Ryan’s wealth. He had but one solution: close it down.
    Declan Ryan agreed and both men travelled to Kilboy to tell Ryan their conclusions. He disagreed, refused to close the airline that carried his name and told them to sort it out. Ryan’s stubbornness was not grounded in blind faith alone. GPA made its money by leasing aircraft to airlines across the world and Ryan knew how poorly those airlines were run. ‘He made millions from their incompetence,’ says O’Leary, ‘and he thought he could do it better than them.’ The trouble was, O’Leary adds, that Ryan may have thought he understood the industry but in truth he knew ‘fuck-all’ about running an airline. O’Leary knew even less, but he was to prove a better student than Ryan.
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    By May 1988, the month O’Leary arrived at the Ryanair offices, O’Neill was able to boast to the London
Times
that