Michael O'Leary (38 page)

O'Leary's growing skill at turning even the worst story into a positive publicity stunt would be tested more and more in the months to come.

In September Ryanair's attempts to place advertisements in Glasgow's central railway station had been met by a sniffy letter from Malden Outdoor, agents for the sites, which said, ‘Regrettably we are unable to accept any form of advertising within the station which is deemed as direct competition to the train services provided.'

Ryanair's flights from Glasgow to London were of course a competitive threat to the trains, but it was naive of the agency to spell this out. O'Leary made the affair public. ‘We're knocking the stuffing out of the rail competition with our £
9
plus tax return fares from Scotland to London,' he said, ‘and the best Railtrack can come up with is “You can't advertise that here.”' The result was that the refusal to carry advertisements drew more attention to Ryanair than the advertisements themselves would have generated.

Soon afterwards O'Leary had another opportunity to practise the art of turning bad news to his company's advantage. In late October 264 Ryanair passengers, including 49 school students, were stranded in Beauvais, the tiny airport on the outskirts of Paris, for two days due to bad weather. Mike O'Hara, the leader of the school party, complained that they were ‘practically ignored' by the airline. ‘I am furious about the treatment we received from Ryanair staff at Beauvais airport,' he told the
Sun.
‘The handling
staff were absolutely brutal and made no effort with us whatsoever. We weren't offered any food, not even a cup of tea, and no one tried at all to accommodate us.'

The
Irish Times
ran a 1,100-word story on the ‘trauma' endured by one passenger, David Gibbons. ‘The accommodation we were offered for the night was in a hangar in the airport with beds like army cots and no showers,' Gibbons complained. ‘Anybody with any money went into Beauvais. I got a two-star hotel for £30 and paid £10 on taxis.' The airline eventually offered passengers a roll and ‘a thimbleful of tea' according to Gibbons.

Any other airline faced with a hostile media onslaught and images of distraught passengers would have made conciliatory noises and perhaps offered compensation. Not Ryanair. The affair was instead another opportunity to hammer home the company's mantra: low fares, nothing more, nothing less. ‘It's not part of our service to provide accommodation or even a cup of tea in these circumstances,' O'Leary said. ‘Some people paid as little as £9 return for their fares, so they can't really expect such extra benefits.'

O'Leary's attack was considered: if you paid a pound for your flight, how could you expect the airline to pay £50 to put you up if the weather was bad? He was also irritated by the Irish media. Ryanair's success did not receive the attention or praise it deserved from a domestic media fascinated by the negatives and bored by the positives. O'Leary's opposition to trade unions, his refusal to become part of the cosy establishment, his wealth and his aggression had turned most of the media against Ryanair.

O'Leary's competitors seemed incapable of learning that the best defence was simply to ignore him and his airline. In September BA had announced it was suing Ryanair in London's High Court for running advertisements which it claimed amounted to trademark infringement and ‘malicious falsehood'. Britain's biggest airline, which liked to call itself the world's favourite, had been irritated by a number of Ryanair advertisements, but the one that stuck in its corporate throat had been run the previous year under the simple but effective headline: ‘Expensive BA———DS'.

BA wanted the courts to give Ryanair a public and expensive dressing-down and calculated that a successful action might take the wind out of O'Leary's billowing sails. Big mistake. In December Mr Justice Jacob delivered his ruling, and it was devastating for BA. The ‘Expensive BA———DS' campaign centred on a comparison of Ryanair's and BA's fares, with O'Leary's company claiming that BA was five times more expensive on certain routes. Jacob said it was ‘particularly odd commercially' that BA should complain that the comparisons were misleading. ‘The complaint amounts to this: that Ryanair exaggerate in suggesting BA is five times more expensive because BA is only three times more expensive,' he said.

The advertisements ‘might amount to vulgar abuse' but they did not constitute malicious falsehood. And then came his withering conclusion. ‘I suspect the real reason BA do not like [the advertisement] is precisely because it is true.'

O'Leary was a happy man. ‘They did not think we could afford to fight them in court,' he said outside, playing his David card even though he would make profits of more than GB£100 million that year, easily enough to fund a few days in London's High Court. ‘It is an age-old dirty trick by BA. But we did fight them and we won. It's game, set and match to us.'

Win some, lose some. On the same day as Justice Jacob made his ruling, Ireland's High Court found against O'Leary in a case brought by Aer Rianta. The airports company had sued Ryanair for £459,885 it claimed was owed to it for unpaid fees due on various routes. Ryanair had subsequently paid just over £103,000 for fees on the Dublin–Bristol route, but Aer Rianta had returned to court in December to claim the remaining £350,000.

O'Leary had claimed that he had held discussions with Aer Rianta's assistant chief executive Brian J. Byrne in which the two men agreed a variation on the standard landing charges for Ryanair and that therefore the £350,000 was never in fact due. Byrne's recollection was somewhat different. He denied any special deal had been agreed. Mr Justice Kelly took the same view, found that there was no written agreement between the airline and the airport,
and that correspondence demonstrated there was no evidence of any amendment to landing charges.

The verdict was squarely against Ryanair. What Ryanair was saying was not credible, Kelly said, and was undermined by documents exhibited by O'Leary. Kelly ordered the airline to pay the full £350,000, as well as 8 per cent interest and Aer Rianta's costs. He also refused to give the airline leave to appeal and refused a stay on his order. For once, O'Leary stayed silent, concentrating instead on milking his victory over BA.

In October 1988 P.J. McGoldrick, Ryanair's then newly appointed chief executive, had marched across the tarmac at Dublin airport to greet an incoming flight. As the passengers disembarked, McGoldrick scooped Jane O'Keeffe, a twenty-one-year-old, into his arms and carried her towards the terminal building, while press photographers clicked away for the next morning's newspapers.

O'Keeffe was the millionth passenger to use the new airline. Her reward, McGoldrick said, would be ‘free flights for life' for her and a partner. ‘What would that cost the company?' a journalist wondered. ‘We don't nitpick over the gifts we give,' McGoldrick replied rather grandly.

At the time money did not really matter in Ryanair. McGoldrick had just taken over from the profligate, if occasionally inspired, regime of Eugene O'Neill and had no idea about the true state of the airline's finances. Simple things like organizing a contract with O'Keeffe that might specify the precise nature of her entitlement and how she could claim it were bothersome details with which the young Ryanair did not concern itself.

For the next ten years O'Keeffe made use of her free flights, nominating first her sister then her new husband as her travelling companion. In the absence of a contract O'Keeffe and the airline had come to a mutually acceptable compromise. If she gave a couple of weeks notice, Ryanair would put her on the flight of her choice. But then came a crunch in the summer of 1998. ‘It blew up one weekend,' O'Leary says.

Our records say she called up on the Friday of a bank holiday weekend insisting on two flights to Prestwick and we had only two seats left, and we said, ‘No, you're not getting it; you have to call in advance.' She claimed she had called two weeks earlier and nobody had gotten back
to her…We couldn't prove it, she couldn't prove it. The difficulty with [the case] was that we inherited it from back in the days when nobody [in Ryanair] had a sheet of paper. The only evidence that she had anything from us was some video clip from the nine o'clock news with P. J. McGoldrick saying she had free flights for life. There was no terms, no conditions, nothing.

O'Keeffe remembers it differently, ‘I did get a contract originally but then they had to make changes [and] they never issued a new one,' she says. ‘It worked very well for many years. It was all very easy, very straightforward. I didn't ask for anything in writing after that because it was all working fine.'

Her troubles started with that Easter flight to Prestwick.

I was due to go over to Scotland and they had told me two days or so before that I couldn't travel. I kept ringing up trying to find out what was going on and one day I was put through to Michael O'Leary. He wasn't expecting me. I was working in Today FM [Ireland's independent national radio station] at the time, sitting in an open-plan office. We had such an argy-bargy on the phone; we were shouting, and when I hung up everybody in my office was looking at me, asking what was that all about? When somebody is shouting at you, it's intimidating and I was trying to make myself heard. The only way I could do that was to raise my voice. Of course I got nowhere. He was saying, ‘Stop ringing me, stop ringing my employees.'

O'Keeffe travelled twice more with Ryanair after that, but the refusal to accommodate her Easter plans had rankled, and she believed that the airline, and O'Leary in particular, could not be trusted to honour McGoldrick's 1988 promise. O'Keeffe's solicitors exchanged letters with Ryanair, seeking a new agreement or compensation. ‘Whatever about the logistics of it, it wasn't right, it wasn't fair,' says O'Keeffe. ‘I wanted to work out something that was workable but we had reached an impasse. There was no real option [but to issue proceedings] because nobody was budging.' So in September 2000 she instructed lawyers to write to
Ryanair, saying that the airline had broken the agreement and seeking compensation of up to £500,000.

‘We said fuck off,' says O'Leary.

In December 2000 the newspapers were alerted to the story, and the feeding frenzy began. ‘It's Ryan-unfair: Woman sues airline as free travel is cancelled,' the
Mirror
proclaimed on 18 December. ‘Stingy Ryanair bosses have grounded a woman who was given free travel for life by the budget airline,' the paper said.

O'Leary was not bothered by the hostile coverage and refused to countenance a settlement with O'Keeffe. He knew the publicity would be bad, but he believed he had to make a stand, if only to show other would-be complainers and litigators that Ryanair never backed down. If you want to take on this company, he was saying, be prepared for a long and expensive fight. It is a strategy that newspapers use against libel claims: they may not fight every claim, but occasionally they pick one to go all the way, just to show that they are prepared to fight and that there is no easy money to be made from suing them. O'Keeffe says she was not after easy money:

They were trying to shaft me for no reason. Halfway through the case they tried to settle and they said, ‘We'll give you back the free flights, you can have them back.' After all I had put up with on the TVand the radio during the last few days [of the court case]…I decided, ‘They don't like me, I don't like them. I don't really want to fly with them any more.' Whatever trust there had been was gone. I'm not small-minded and petty, but when I walked up those court steps I didn't feel good about them.

O'Leary's belligerence was not shared by his colleagues. ‘It was one of those things where Michael really didn't carry the rest of the company with him,' says Tim Jeans. ‘Nobody could see the point of it. Why put us through all this grief and all this bad PR?' Jeans might have been right, but O'Leary was not for turning.

The O'Keeffe case would fester in the background for many months as it wound its way to the courts, but it would not be the only generator of bad publicity for O'Leary. His hostility to
O'Keeffe was mild compared to the contempt he reserved for Mary O'Rourke, Ireland's minister for transport. She was his bê te noire – a woman for whom he had no respect yet who had power over key decisions that could make a real impact on his company's growth and its earnings. The loathing was mutual.

Originally a primary schoolteacher, O'Rourke's family connections – recently her brother had been a senior cabinet minister – ensured her a power base within the governing Fianna Fáil party. As transport minister O'Rourke was the majority shareholder in Aer Lingus and the sole shareholder in Aer Rianta. If O'Leary were to get a second terminal at Dublin airport he would either need O'Rourke's support or he would have to undermine her to such a degree that she lost her job or simply buckled under the pressure.

At the start of the year she had again rejected O'Leary's proposals for a new terminal, claiming that the European Union would not allow the government to give Ryanair special treatment. ‘I will be writing back asking her whether or not she wants to support our proposal to open ten new routes from Ireland to Europe and the UK, creating 500 new jobs and carrying two million passengers a year,' he replied.

At the end of January 2001 O'Rourke was at her most vulnerable. Enda, her husband of forty years, died suddenly after suffering a brain haemorrhage. His funeral drew crowds of mourners, including Mary McAleese, the Irish president, Bertie Ahern, the taoiseach, and senior politicians from all the major political parties. O'Leary, to O'Rourke's surprise, joined the mourners. It was a momentary ceasefire.

A few days later he launched a series of personal attacks on O'Rourke through full-page newspaper advertisements depicting her in a bathtub, with the headline, ‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your monopoly grow? It doesn't'. O'Rourke was appalled. ‘He did it four days after Enda died, and he saw me; he was at the funeral and I was roaring crying,' she says. ‘If you wrote a novel about a man who four days after this woman's husband had died, that he set out to torture her, you'd think it was unbelievable,
because you would say nobody could be that cold or that horrid, but he was. He didn't care.'