Matt Cooper - Michael O’Leary: Turbulent Times for the Man Who Made Ryanair

Matt Cooper has had a thirty-year career at the heart of Irish current affairs journalism. He presents the daily drive-time show The Last Word on Today FM and co-presents The Tonight Show on Virgin Media 1. Before becoming a broadcaster Cooper was an award-winning print journalist (two-time national print journalist of the year) and newspaper editor (at the helm of the Sunday Tribune for six years). He is now a leader page columnist with the Irish Daily Mail and contributor to the Sunday Business Post. He has made a number of economic and political documentaries for television and is also an experienced TV sports host (anchoring TV3s Rugby World Cup coverage in 2015). Having accompanied the former US basketball star Dennis Rodman on his extraordinary goodwill visit to North Korea in January 2014, Cooper narrated the cinema-released feature documentary about the trip, Dennis Rodmans Big Bang in Pyongyang. He is the author of three bestselling books, Who Really Runs Ireland? (2009), How Ireland Really Went Bust (2011) and The Maximalist: The Rise and Fall of Tony OReilly (2015). Originally from Cork, he lives in Dublin with his wife and their five children.

Matt Cooper

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MICHAEL OLEARY

Turbulent Times for the Man Who Made Ryanair

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Portfolio Penguin is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

First published 2018

Copyright Matt Cooper, 2018

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Photoshot/Topfoto

ISBN: 978-0-241-31564-4

As always, to my family, Aileen and our children,
Andie, Aimee, Millie, Zach and Harry

Michael OLeary treated the letter from pilots demanding his resignation as chief executive officer at Ryanair with scorn.

We suggest you leave now, and we call on the board and investors to engage a new CEO to return this airline to its rightful place, the letter demanded. It was signed on behalf of the European Employee Representative Council (EERC), an unofficial body established by disgruntled Ryanair pilots in 2017 apparently thousands of them as part of their campaign for better working conditions. The group had enjoyed considerable success in putting the airline, and its boss, on the back foot, and was looking to press its advantage.

OLeary read their demands and was angry. Once the anger subsided, he decided that he would punish this impertinence. As far as he was concerned, he was back in control and he would not be undermined again, especially by pilots. To him, this letter was a sign of weakness on their part, a desperate plea from people who thought they had him where they wanted him. So he decided that he would let these troublemakers know, again, how little he thought of them, and that he would do so publicly.

It was late February 2018, and the fallout from the most difficult year of OLearys professional career was ongoing. He dictated a statement for publication in his defence, insisting that the EERC had no legal standing or validity and therefore would be ignored. The contents of the letter hed received, which claimed a mass exodus of unhappy Ryanair pilots, were said to be ridiculous and bizarre. Given OLearys public behaviour over the previous decades, it wasnt hard to imagine that, had it been a vocal rejoinder, he would probably have added the words and they can fuck off.

He hated them and they hated him. Their demand for him to resign might have been genuine, but it was also naive. Notwithstanding thirty years of conflict with OLeary, they failed completely to understand their adversary, or that he continued to hold the balance of power. It was typical of OLeary to be so confrontational, even if he had been giving regular interviews since 2013 promising to be nice, implying that he was a more mature and measured individual now. It wasnt that he was annoyed that the pilots had implored him to do the decent thing now and leave before you do any further damage and made their demand public. He just didnt respect or fear their analysis.

The pilots or at least those represented by the EERC claimed that the airline would face a future of flight cancellations because so many pilots were resigning, despite the significantly improved pay on offer from Ryanair. After the very public debacle of 2017, when Ryanair experienced the humiliation of cancelling thousands of flights, the pilots seemed to think that OLeary would do anything not to endure that experience ever again.

OLeary was confident that he was on top of the situation and had enough pilots on his side to ensure further flight cancellations at Europes largest airline wouldnt happen. He would not be threatened. He was prepared to confront strike action if necessary, believing that he could face down the pilots and not suffer public opprobrium if even more flights didnt take to the skies. As many pilots had already taken the enhanced pay deals on offer, involving as much as 20,000 extra per year, and as they were divided between those who had taken the money on offer and those who were gambling they could get more, he felt he could convince the public that the EERC pilots were just being greedy. The public would be angry with them, not with him or his airline.

Admittedly, OLeary had previously misjudged the strength of his collective opposition. That uncharacteristic miscalculation had led to the cancellations and the extraordinary concession of trade-union recognition in late 2017, something he had sworn would never happen, in any circumstances. To the onlooker, it seemed all of these blows must have dented OLearys reputation and Ryanairs recent efforts to improve its brand image. To OLeary, it was just another wave to ride out. He disdains conventional thinking, believing that it is too often emotional instead of rational. His way of looking at things is different from most peoples. He never bows to the wisdom of crowds, or the demands of the mob or the media. The record shows that he is almost always right. This has given him enormous self-confidence, which his enemies see as arrogance. Yet he has enough self-awareness to realize that what he has always done is not what always should be done, and that there are times when he has to shift course. He doesnt care if he is criticized for changing his mind or his actions, regarding that as irrelevant. He shifts with the shape of the airline industrys paradigm.

As a result, OLeary remained confident that his vision for Ryanair would be realized. His was an airline that had flown about 130 million passengers across the Continent in the twelve months to the end of March 2018, in spite of the very well-publicized problems during that period. He knew he would report profits of just over 1.3 billion for the year. He was running over 2,000 daily flights from 86 bases across 33 countries, connecting over 200 individual destinations, and those numbers were growing. Ryanair had a fleet of 430 Boeing 737 aircraft in use, and a further 240 on order to buy. OLearys ambition was to lift the number of annual customers to 200 million by 2024, and to raise his profits in line with that. This was a company worth over 18 billion. He spoke of its becoming the worlds largest airline, and he meant it. He certainly wasnt going to turn his back on all of that just because a bunch of pilots didnt like him.