Despite the animosity between Bertie Ahern and Michael O’Leary, the two men shared a common ambition: both wanted rid of Mary O’Rourke.
Ahern’s reasons for wanting to see the back of the transport minister were a little more complex than O’Leary’s, but the taoiseach was in a better position to get what he wanted – though it would not be easy. O’Rourke’s deep family connections within Fianna Fáil and her longevity as a minister and TD meant that dropping her from the cabinet would provoke some internal party strife and would also create a troublesome presence for Ahern on his party’s backbenches.
Confrontation was never Ahern’s style, so he allowed P.J. Mara, Fianna Fáil’s director of elections, to engineer a situation in O’Rourke’s constituency – which included O’Leary’s home county of Westmeath – that would make it extremely difficult for her in the next general election, due in May 2002. Donie Cassidy, an ineffectual but loyal member of the party, would stand alongside O’Rourke and fellow party member Peter Kelly in an attempt, so the party said, to maximize the vote and win a potential three seats in the five-seat constituency.
Ireland’s proportional representation voting system is a complex affair, with voters marking their candidates in order of preference so that their votes can be transferred to other candidates once their first choice has been either elected or eliminated from the race. Maximizing the vote among two or three candidates is a difficult and imprecise science for a political party, and fraught with danger.
O’Rourke knew that Fianna Fáil’s decision to run a third candidate would create problems for her, and she fumed about being ‘shafted’ by Ahern. Her fears were realized when she was defeated, although Kelly and Cassidy were both elected and her party was swept back into government in what was as close to a landslide victory as the Irish system can deliver.
‘Ahern would not have reappointed her to cabinet in any case,’ says one close adviser, ‘because she was a loose cannon. But he was too pragmatic to actually organize a defeat. Like her or loathe her, he wanted as many Fianna Fáil seats as possible, and if she had won he would have been very close to an overall majority. But to achieve that, he had to win three seats from constituencies like hers, and if it didn’t work, he wouldn’t shed a tear if she was the loser.’
O’Leary has consistently denied that he played a role in O’Rourke’s political demise. He did not fund Cassidy’s campaign for election, although his victory certainly suited his agenda. And even though Mara, who worked for O’Leary from time to time as a political lobbyist, had helped engineer her defeat, O’Leary claims there was no connection and no hidden agenda. Cassidy concurs.
I didn’t talk to [O’Leary] much during the election campaign and he didn’t actively support me. What can you do, only call to a person’s door and ask them for their vote? I most certainly did call to his door. I was looking forward to calling to it because I knew I was coming home to a friend. We had a cup of coffee and we sat down. He said, ‘You have a big challenge on your hands.’ I said, ‘I know it’s not going to be easy.’ He would have had lots of points to raise in relation to Ryanair, what the government should be doing. He raised those and very forcefully. I knew exactly where he was coming from and what he was doing.
Cassidy’s election ensured that the department of transport would get a new minister. No one, O’Leary reckoned, could be worse than O’Rourke. In fact, her replacement was a lot better for O’Leary. The early candidates were Mary Harney, leader of the Progressive Democrats, and Seamus Brennan. Either would suit O’Leary. Harney’s party were free-market liberals who would embrace the concept of competition at Ireland’s airports, while Brennan, the architect of Ireland’s two-airlines policy years earlier, had already proved his credentials as a politician who was not afraid to challenge and reform state monopolies.
On 6 June Ahern announced his new cabinet, and Brennan was appointed minister for transport. The mood swing was immediate. Within two weeks of taking over at the department Brennan had invited O’Leary to a private meeting to discuss the airline industry and the Irish Times could report that Brennan wanted ‘to make peace with Ryanair’.
O’Leary accepted Brennan’s olive branch, but Ryanair’s attacks on the government did not cease; O’Leary just had to find a new target. It was hardly a shock that Ahern should replace O’Rourke as the butt of O’Leary’s humour. ‘The hate beam turned from O’Rourke to Bertie,’ says one former executive. ‘It was a very smooth transition.’
On 18 June 2002 the London Times published on its front page a confidential safety report by an air traffic controller which claimed that pilots ‘working for at least one low-cost airline’ were disobeying air traffic control instructions because they were under ‘extreme pressure on the flight deck to achieve programmed sector flight times’. The Times said that ‘the report is understood to refer principally to Ryanair and its base at Stansted in Essex’.
The controller claimed that pilots were sometimes forced to abandon landings because they approached too quickly and came too close to the aircraft in front. Pilots, he said, were also ignoring longer flight paths designed to reduce noise disturbance, and were flying too low or passing directly over villages. He also claimed controllers were receiving ‘overly aggressive responses’ from pilots, who were repeatedly challenging information on visibility and whether the aircraft in front had successfully cleared the runway. The air traffic controller said he had filed his report with the industry’s Confidential Human Factors Incident Reporting Programme (Chirp) because he was concerned that the growing number of incidents involving budget airlines could result in a crash.
Stelios Haji Ioannou, the founder of easyJet, decided to engage in some Ryanair bashing. ‘Combine a low-cost airline with old aircraft and the odds of your reputation surviving an accident are against you,’ he told The Times.
Ryanair’s only input in the original article was from Tim Jeans: ‘We don’t cut corners while the aircraft is airborne. Turnaround times are tighter but safety and security are an absolute priority and there is nothing we would do to compromise that. There is no more pressure on our pilots to depart on time than there is on British Airways.’
As soon as the article was published, O’Leary went on full offensive. The controller, he said, was ‘loony’ and Chirp was ‘the equivalent of a PPrune chat room’ – a reference to the Professional Pilots Rumour Network website where pilots exchange industry gossip anonymously. O’Leary also attacked the controller for not reporting his concerns to the UK Civil Aviation Authority. ‘The report from one single air traffic controller is subjective nonsense with no basis in fact or evidence,’ he said. ‘The controller is duty-bound by procedures to file a report to the Civil Aviation Authority. He’s broken the law if he hasn’t filed this concern with the CAA.’
He also rejected claims that Ryanair’s pilots were under more pressure than anyone else’s. ‘Our pilots are under less pressure because we don’t operate to the busiest airports like Heathrow, Charles de Gaulle or Frankfurt,’ he said. ‘I don’t even know how we would put our pilots under pressure. What do you do? Call him up as he’s coming in to land?’
The Times story caused no lasting damage but would have proved explosive if Ryanair had been involved in a serious safety incident in its aftermath. O’Leary’s strongest argument that safety is paramount comes from the bare statistics: in more than twenty years of flying Ryanair has never experienced a serious or fatal crash. There have been blips – planes sliding off runways, pilots landing at the wrong airport or botching approaches – but they have been isolated and rare.
On 29 August 2002 a Ryanair flight was due to leave Stockholm’s Vasteras airport at 15.55 local time, bound for Stansted.
As the passengers filed through the security point, a guard noticed that one of the passengers, who appeared to be travelling as part of a large group of Muslim men, had a gun in his hand luggage. Kerim Sadok Chatty was arrested immediately and the flight was grounded. Inevitably, the media fed on the drama, their stories fuelled by briefings from unnamed security sources who revealed that Chatty had taken flying lessons in the United States. The parallels with the previous year’s attacks on 11 September were unavoidable. The News of the World, Britain’s largest-selling newspaper, ran the headline: ‘Gunman plotted to fly Irish jet into US embassy, 189 Ryanair passengers escape death by a whisker’. Chatty, however, maintained that it was all a mistake, and that he had simply forgotten he had a gun in his luggage. A known criminal with previous convictions for gun-related offences, Chatty had no known link to Islamic terrorism, and his flying lessons had taken place years earlier and resulted in ignominious failure. In time the terrorism charges against him would be dropped because of a lack of evidence, but for the moment Ryanair and all other airlines, were once again under the spotlight.
There was more bad news for Ryanair on 1 September, when it emerged that the airline was facing a landmark legal action by Bob Ross, a cerebral palsy sufferer who had fallen victim to its policy of charging passengers for the use of wheelchairs. The combined effect of the near-hijacking and the Ross litigation wiped 9 per cent off Ryanair’s share price on 3 September, the shares’ largest drop in seven months.
‘Ryanair has been very publicly highlighted because of the Swedish incident, even though that could have happened to any airline, and it’s being sued by a wheelchair user,’ said Kevin McConnell, an analyst at Bloxham Stockbrokers. ‘The worry that something serious will happen is enough to keep investors away.’
Faced with a tumbling share price and hostile press coverage O’Leary reacted as he always did: he launched a million-seat giveaway on 17 September. Free fares, available for the next three months, with the passenger just paying the relevant taxes and airport charges. Predictable but effective.
The rapprochement between Ryanair and the department of transport instigated by Seamus Brennan’s appointment as minister in June bore early fruit. In July Brennan introduced proposals for temporary facilities at Dublin airport for low-cost airlines until permanent facilities were built. O’Leary for once was happy with the government. ‘It [Brennan’s appointment] has been very positive,’ he said. ‘We have seen more action in one month than in the previous five years. Certainly, it [the temporary facility] is welcome but we also want a long-term fix.’
Brennan was listening. In early August the department of transport tendered for expressions of interest in developing a new terminal at Dublin airport. At long last, it seemed, Ryanair was going to get what it had been pursuing so relentlessly for six years. O’Leary was pleased but he wanted more. He hoped that Brennan would not ‘stop at a second terminal but consider third and fourth terminals as well’.
Brennan’s request for tenders met an enthusiastic response. By late September, at the Ryanair annual general meeting, O’Leary could tell his shareholders that eleven companies had expressed interest in building the second terminal. Ryanair made its tender and remained prepared to build the terminal itself if no one else could do it as cheaply, but O’Leary was unconcerned about who actually won the contract – as long as it wasn’t Aer Rianta. ‘If nobody would do it, we’d pay for it, we’d build it, we’d give it to somebody else to operate it. We just wanted some competition with Aer Rianta out there and we have been consistent in that for years.’
At the end of October the final list of thirteen interested bidders was unveiled, and O’Leary wanted to proceed at speed to actual construction. He would be frustrated. As he complained to Brennan in a letter, ‘Your department now proposes to waste two further years appointing consultants, designing, planning and tendering, with the result that even allowing for no slippages in planning, etc. a new terminal won’t be available until summer 2006, almost the entire life of the present government. This is ridiculously lethargic.’
He backed his call for immediate action with his own proposals for the second terminal. Under Ryanair plans the facility would cost €114 million to develop, would be able to handle ten million passengers a year and would be operational by 2004. The airline also backed plans to build a third terminal at the airport, but to no avail. Brennan’s spurt of activity, his promise of early action and his sense of urgency had swiftly dissipated. The debate about a second terminal went far deeper than economics and passenger comfort; it was a political argument and a deeply divisive one. Brennan faced formidable opposition from the unions and from Aer Rianta and, by extension, from members of his own government, who had no interest in going to war with the unions, particularly if the main winner of that war was Michael O’Leary.
O’Leary’s belief that all publicity was good publicity had been severely tested in the preceding months. Earlier in the year he had stumbled into a political row when his decision to open a route to Austria’s Klagenfurt airport had turned into a publicity stunt for Jörg Haider, the far-right Austrian politician. The alleged attempted hijacking in Sweden had caused another flurry of headlines, resurrecting fears of another 9/11-style terrorist outrage, and then came news of the court action against Ryanair by Bob Ross. Passenger bookings were holding up, but the company’s share price was not.
O’Leary needed to review his public- and investor-relations strategies, and he needed to improve the share price performance. At the time the company’s in-house communications unit was low key, reporting to Michael Cawley, and not directly to O’Leary, who dealt mainly with Murray Consultants, Ryanair’s external PR advisers. The challenges that lay ahead required a new strategy and O’Leary decided to appoint a communications manager who would report directly to him, and to give the position senior executive status. O’Leary judged candidates on two main criteria: they had to be strong-willed enough and self-confident enough to handle him, and they had to have an instinctive understanding of how the media worked.
His choice was Paul Fitzsimmons, a young Northern Irish man who knew nothing about the airline industry. Fitzsimmons, who worked for Today FM, a young independent radio station, had been a journalist and understood the media, but he also had to handle Eamon Dunphy, Today FM’s explosive and unpredictable star performer. Dunphy, a former footballer, was Ireland’s self-styled media maverick: abrasive, opinionated and addicted to controversy. Fitzsimmons says,
He thought if I could handle Dunphy I could handle him. Dunphy is tough and he’s demanding and he rants and he raves. And also he wanted someone who really could understand media. I’m a journalist by profession. I didn’t know anything about airlines. I did my usual read-up before the interview, but when I got there I realized I knew nothing about it. And he said that’s a distinct advantage, we don’t want people with baggage and the old way of doing things.
Apart from the steady onslaught of poor publicity, O’Leary was also conscious that his own high profile had created the impression that Ryanair had metamorphosed into O’Learyair – a perception which was accurate but dangerous for the company, and particularly for its relationship with investors. A key part of Fitzsimmons’ role would be to withdraw O’Leary from the media spotlight and build up other managers in the company so that Ryanair would be perceived as a mature business rather than a one-man band.
The overriding strategy was to withdraw him and build up [Michael Cawley and Howard Millar]. If I had an investment magazine from the US ringing up asking lots of financial stuff, I’d have said to O’Leary, ‘Let Howard handle this one.’ If it was something they were comfortable with, no problem. But if it was anything outside of that, or a sticky situation or anything we needed to put our dancing shoes on for then it would have been me and O’Leary all the time.
O’Leary left Fitzsimmons in no doubt about his publicity philosophy.
In my first week there was a huge article in the travel section of the Sunday Telegraph, O’Leary’s dream paper. They’d spent a day at Stansted, and it was shitty weather and there were lots of flight cancellations and delays and stuff and this was two pages in a big important travel section.
I said to Michael, ‘Did you see that piece in the Telegraph ?’ And he said, ‘What was wrong with it?’ And I said, ‘We were slated, the flights were late, there was no information, it was awful.’ He said, ‘Come here and have a look at the booking figures for Sunday.’ [The Telegraph story] was the only story about us that Sunday. And the figures had actually gone up. He said, ‘There’s no such thing as bad publicity.’ And so, on the premise that there is no such thing as bad publicity, we went after everything.
We’d have done anything to get publicity. We were complete full-on prostitutes for publicity.
Ryanair’s relentless expansion into Europe was now more than just an irritant to the major airlines who had failed to anticipate the growth of low-cost travel. Air France, Lufthansa and British Airways had all been forced to slash airfares on short-haul routes to stave off the competition from Ryanair, easyJet and the growing number of small low-fare carriers who were eating away at their business. Now the fightback was about to move to a different level.
In October Ryanair launched a twice-daily service between Strasbourg in north-eastern France and London Stansted. Amid the fanfare of the launch Ryanair mentioned that it would receive €1.4 million in marketing support from the airport for the launch of the new route. Brit Air, the Air France subsidiary which was Ryanair’s main competitor at Strasbourg, was not impressed. In November Brit Air’s chairman Marc Lamidey publicly denounced the marketing support as a ‘subsidy’ and threatened to sue the local chamber of commerce, which owned the airport, unless the same offer was made available to his airline.
Lamidey’s complaint, which would grow into a legal action, was the first strike in Air France’s campaign against Ryanair. Weeks after Brit Air complained about Strasbourg the EC confirmed that anonymous allegations had been made about Ryanair’s relationship with Charleroi, the state-owned airport near Brussels. ‘What we are doing is opening investigation proceedings into the advantages granted by Wallonia [the regional government that owned the airport] to Ryanair operating from Charleroi,’ Transport Commissioner Loyola de Palacio announced. She said that her commission had been conducting informal investigations into the situation at Charleroi for about a year, having received a complaint from an unnamed Ryanair competitor. That informal probe had raised ‘doubts regarding the nature of the measures taken by [the Belgian authorities] which exclusively benefit Ryanair and might constitute state aid incompatible with the proper functioning of the internal market’.
For O’Leary, de Palacio’s decision to launch a formal investigation represented a serious worry. It was one thing to scrap with competitors, slashing fares and running in and out of court, but it was quite another thing to do battle with the EU. The European Union’s commissioners tend to be seasoned politicians, often former cabinet ministers in their own countries. Nominated by their governments, the commissioners preside over the vast Brussels bureaucracy and have wide-ranging powers. De Palacio would be a dangerous foe for O’Leary, and was less vulnerable than elected politicians to his normal tactics of denigration and mockery.
Ryanair’s operations at Strasbourg and Charleroi went to the heart of its business model. O’Leary used small regional airports for straightforward operational reasons – lack of congestion made for fast turnaround times – but a central motivation was money. Small underutilized airports were desperate for business and open to negotiation. Landing charges could be reduced to nothing or next to nothing, and O’Leary could also extract marketing contributions for each new route opened. Minimal landing charges combined with marketing incentives meant that Ryanair’s costs were substantially lower than the costs of airlines that flew to more traditional and more expensive airports.
‘People always think the marketing support is a bit fishy but it actually isn’t at all,’ says one executive.
What we say is we’re going to advertise your destination because we’re the carriers, but you actually get the benefit. If €20,000 is spent on a newspaper advertisement selling flights to somewhere, the benefit from those passengers does not stop the second they hop off the plane. The beneficiaries are the airline and the region. Essentially we are saying that if we’re charging £19 for a flight to Strasbourg and Brit Air are charging £119, that’s an extra £100 that the passengers are going to spend in your shops, in your hotels and restaurants and therefore there’s a benefit.
At Charleroi, though, the benefits to Ryanair had been extensive. The airport had agreed to pay hundreds of thousands of euros towards Ryanair’s recruitment and training costs and €160,000 for every new route. Ryanair was provided with free offices, and landing charges were set at €1 per passenger, less than a tenth of those at larger airports.
Most alarming was the realization that de Palacio’s investigation had the potential to spread to every state-owned airport with which Ryanair had struck deals, and could unravel all of them. ‘We were in Milan doing a press conference when [news of the investigation] broke,’ says Fitzsimmons. ‘We were fielding phone calls from journalists. We were trying to get holding statements put in place, and then when we got back to Dublin we thought, Oh fuck, this is going to be serious.’
O’Leary was for once uncertain how to respond. Should he choose all-out aggression or feign indifference? Initially, he went for indifference. ‘The arrangements at Charleroi airport are competitive, non-discriminatory and available to all,’ he said. ‘Ryanair have no concern about any formal or informal inquiries made by the EU into our successful operations at Brussels Charleroi. Firstly, [the inquiry] will have no impact on Ryanair. Secondly, we welcome it.’ He told the Financial Times, ‘Someone here is looking for a smoking gun and there isn’t one.’
He also resorted to his favourite diversionary tactic of launching a seat sale, offering 200,000 seats to or from Charleroi for €9.99.O’Leary’s public sangfroid, however, did not placate the markets. Stock market analysts fretted that challenges to Ryanair’s lucrative deals with state-owned European airports could destroy its business plan, and the airline’s share price subsided.
Indifference was clearly not going to work and O’Leary changed tack. The investigation, he decided, had to be portrayed as yet another David versus Goliath battle. He had to paint Ryanair as the champion of cheap fares for the common man, and the commission as the bureaucratic bad guys who, if they made the wrong decision, would be punishing the people. O’Leary put out a statement:
Ryanair and Brussels Charleroi Airport have been the champions of low fares choice and bringing the cost of air travel within the budget of ordinary consumers and not just the rich. Ryanair will continue to fight for low fares in Europe. We remain confident that the politically motivated investigation launched by the Commission this week will ultimately confirm that Ryanair’s low-cost base at Brussels Charleroi is not in breach of state aid rules and we hope that Commissioner de Palacio will move quickly to expedite this investigation and allow Ryanair to get on with the process of rolling out competition, consumer choice and low fares all over Europe.
More than a quarter of the airports with which O’Leary had struck deals were state-owned, and therefore liable to investigation by the EU, whose remit was to prevent government subsidies from distorting the market place.
The irony was not lost on O’Leary. The EU was using powers it had been given primarily to prevent governments from bailing out national airlines to attack a private airline that had brought competition to Europe’s skies. It was a legalistic and bureaucratic twist that infuriated him but that he could not avoid. He could argue that Ryanair’s planes brought hope and prosperity to regions, like Charleroi, which had been dying before his airline’s arrival; he could argue that low fares were egalitarian, that they worked in favour of closer European integration by making possible a mobile labour market; but he could not deny he was receiving payments from airports. And since a number of those airports were owned by the states in which they were located Ryanair was in receipt of state money. The key questions were whether that money was a subsidy that distorted the market, and whether it was available to all airlines or just to Ryanair.
For the commission, its investigation of Ryanair would be a precedent-setting case that would establish the ground rules for the new low-fare market as it expanded across Europe. Its difficulty, however, would be in distinguishing competition between airports and competition between airlines. Was Ryanair’s deal with Charleroi a problem for other airlines or a problem for rival airports? And how to balance the needs of a small airport trying to break into a new market with the needs of an established airport? Ryanair’s case was further complicated by the fact the regional government was accused of giving illegal aid to a foreign rather than to a Belgian airline, an unusual twist on the more common accusation of governments propping up their own national carriers with taxpayers’ money.
O’Leary knew he needed to construct a scenario that allowed Ryanair to emerge as the winner no matter what the commission finally decided, and he needed to position Ryanair as the uncrowned king of low fares and competition. ‘The ramifications [of an adverse decision] for the other airports loomed large,’ says Fitzsimmons. ‘So it had to be fought. There could be no rolling over here.’
The Strasbourg and Charleroi cases had temporarily derailed O’Leary’s plans to retire from the spotlight. Now, while the commission started its lengthy probe, he got back on track. In January 2003 Michael Cawley, the chief financial officer, and Howard Millar, the finance director, were promoted to the newly created positions of joint deputy chief executive. Cawley also assumed the title of chief operating officer, with Millar taking over as chief financial officer.
The promotions, which reflected O’Leary’s determination to highlight the strength and depth of the company’s management, came after a period of some turbulence in the senior ranks. Conor McCarthy, the Aer Lingus executive poached just before the flotation in 1997, had been the first significant major departure, leaving his role as operations director just over two years earlier. ‘After four and a half years I got pretty tired of doing the job that I was doing and wanted to try and move on to other things,’ McCarthy says. ‘I’ve never regretted leaving.’
The next senior casualty was Tim Jeans, who quit his position as sales and marketing director in July 2002. And then Charlie Clifton, a Ryanair veteran, resigned as director of ground operations and inflight in December 2002. O’Leary shows uncharacteristic regret at Clifton’s departure. ‘Charlie was a good guy,’ he says. ‘Of them all I was sorry to see Charlie go. It just got too much for him. He’d done so much, he’d just had enough of the stress and the hassle and the remorseless grind of it all.’
Cawley and Millar’s promotions put a new structure in place, one designed to both reassure the markets that there was more to Ryanair than its noisy chief executive and establish a stable management structure to steer the company through a period of exceptionally rapid growth. That both men had a firm grounding in finance was no accident; careful financial management was the key to Ryanair’s profitable growth.
Below the top team of three sat O’Leary’s ‘Z team’: the executive management layer who gathered each Monday to review the airline’s operations. The regulars were Jim Callaghan, head of regulatory affairs; David O’Brien, director of inflight; Ray Conway, the chief pilot; Mick Hickey, engineering director; Caroline Green, head of customer services; Eddie Wilson, head of personnel; Bernard Berger, head of route development; and Paul Fitzsimmons, head of communications.
The Monday meeting was, and remains, a fraught affair. O’Leary’s approach is abrasive and dismissive. Echoing the cry of Margaret Thatcher to her cabinet ministers, he wants solutions not problems, and is relentless in his demands for fresh ideas to curb costs and raise revenues. ‘There were people who had been there for ages, who should really know better, who either walked into trouble or wouldn’t know when to stop digging,’ recalls one Z team member. ‘You could either let him hear what he wanted to hear, whether or not it would actually happen, or drop the subject. If you fought him he’d just keep going and keep going. But there’s only ever one winner.’
O’Leary chaired the meetings from the head of the table in his starkly furnished glass-walled office, which looks onto a busy open-plan work area. To his left was O’Brien, who was usually first to be called upon for his operations update. O’Brien was promoted to operations director in December 2002, and had arrived at the senior management table via an unusual route. From 1992 to 1996 he had been director of ground operations and inflight with Ryanair but had then defected to Aer Rianta, O’Leary’s bête noire, from 1996 to 1998 before returning to Ryanair in 1998 as director of UK operations.
‘David’s soft-spoken, good at his job and he has a huge task to try and control. But he’s a bit of a digger,’ says one team member. ‘Michael would ask, “Have you got the answer to that?” David would say, “No,” and Michael would say, “Don’t come to the fucking meeting without the actual stats.”’ Instead of retreating, O’Brien would plough on. ‘David would say, “But —” [prompting] Michael [to] say, “David, shut the fuck up.” And so it would go on.’
Next to O’Brien sat Conway, the chief pilot, who joined Ryanair in 1987 and was promoted to the top table in June 2002. O’Leary’s natural disdain for pilots did not make life easy for Conway. ‘He was too slick, too good-looking, he was all the things Michael hated,’ says one executive.
Conway, who served as an officer with the Irish Air Corps for fourteen years before joining Ryanair, was immune to O’Leary’s hostility. ‘He had a nice life, earned nice money and had a flash car. He’d argue a bit but then he just couldn’t be bothered. He’d say, “Right Michael, if that’s what you want that’s what you’ll get,”’ says the executive.
To Conway’s left was Mick Hickey, one of the more experienced executives, who had joined the company in 1988 and had established a rapport with O’Leary that few enjoyed. ‘He got off relatively lightly,’ says another executive. ‘Michael had a lot of respect for him.’ It helped too that Hickey was responsible for safety, an area where O’Leary would not compromise.
Next to Hickey, at the end of the table, was Michael Cawley, who became known as Daddy because part of his role was to protect other executives from O’Leary’s explosions. ‘If he saw that O’Leary was being unreasonable he would try and interject,’ says one executive. ‘He’d defend you or he’d try to deflect it. He’d say, “Come on, Michael, we should really come back to this…” and O’Leary was usually okay with that.’ Cawley had no qualms about tackling O’Leary. ‘Cawley argues back with him a bit and is quite dogmatic,’ a colleague says. ‘He’d say, “Michael, you’re not listening, you can’t do that.” His priorities were always commercial, what routes weren’t working, what airports weren’t giving good deals.’
Next to Cawley, at the opposite side of the table, sat Jim Calla-ghan. A lawyer trained in the US, Callaghan had been head of regulatory affairs since May 2000 and company secretary since June 2002.
The only woman at the table, Caroline Green, was to Callaghan’s left. Green’s brief was and still is customer services, or ‘the warm and fluffy department’, as O’Leary calls it. ‘She wouldn’t get it that much,’ says a colleague. ‘She stood her ground quite well with him but he would have her in tears a couple of times. He would stop once she started crying. He’d say, “Don’t take it too personally.” And afterwards he’d make sure he’d be nice to her.’
Paul Fitzsimmons, the newly arrived head of communications, sat next to Green. ‘He never really got it too bad from him at the meeting,’ says an executive. ‘He’d say, “I hear what you’re saying, Michael. I’ll do that, Michael.”’
Next to Fitzsimmons was Eddie Wilson, who had assumed the position of director of personnel and inflight on Clifton’s departure in December 2002. ‘Eddie would have been like David [O’Brien],’ says a source. ‘He would have got it in the neck a lot. He would have been a digger. It’d be like, “But Michael, but Michael—” “Eddie, just fucking do it.” “But Michael, but Michael—” “Eddie, just fucking do it.”’
To Wilson’s left and O’Leary’s right, sat Millar. While Millar lacks O’Leary’s dynamism, insiders say he is cut from very much the same financial cloth as his chief executive. ‘Howard is very close to O’Leary in the financial sense,’ says one former colleague. ‘He trusts Howard. Howard does the fuel hedging, the stuff like that…O’Leary knows a fair bit about it but not as much as Howard does. If you want someone moving money around and investing and making money on money, in the money market, hedging, bonds, Howard is brilliant at that.’
The dynamics of the meetings never changed: O’Leary demanding answers, ideas and innovations, his executives scrabbling for answers and hoping to be left alone. Outside the company he was trying to create the impression of a team, but inside Ryanair remained as driven as it had ever been by the obsession and determination of one man. The others made it happen – striking deals with airports, organizing schedules, juggling the finances, keeping the planes in the air – but the glue that bound them into Europe’s most aggressive and successful young airline was still O’Leary. His executives did not have to like him, and did not have to know him personally (few did), but they had to respect and respond to his urgings.
The promotion of Cawley and Millar did however provide some ballast in upper management. For investors, their grasp of the finances projected an image of a company that cared more about substance than style. Internally, though, little changed: O’Leary led, others followed. But Cawley and Millar had become the front-runners to replace O’Leary if disaster were to strike, and investors now had the opportunity to assess them.