Michael O'Leary (44 page)

O'Leary said the first he had heard of the bullying allegation was ‘when I read it in the papers at Heathrow last Friday'. He added, ‘I'm not sure how it's possible to bully someone on the phone.'

Several other Ryanair staff members were called to give evidence, including Tim Jeans. ‘That was the nadir of my career,' he says.

I'll never forget, I walked up and I was so nervous going up to the stand. And the judge had clearly taken an instant dislike to us. Nothing we were going to do or say in that courtroom was going to win over that judge. And the first thing he told me to do was take my hands out of my pockets. For some reason I had walked onto the stand with my hands in my pockets. It started badly and it went downhill from there.

Jeans sympathized with O'Keeffe's position. ‘I had negotiated one to one with Jane O'Keeffe, who was actually a perfectly decent human being. I really couldn't argue with her,' he said. ‘She had been given free flights for life and Michael decided she wasn't going to have them any more.'

It would take Justice Peter Kelly more than three months to deliver his verdict, and it contained no good news for O'Leary. Kelly concluded that he had indeed been ‘hostile and aggressive' to O'Keeffe, and awarded her €67,500 in compensation. The money was irrelevant to Ryanair and substantially less than O'Keeffe had been hoping for, but Kelly's criticism of O'Leary was damning.

‘I found the plaintiff [O'Keeffe] a more persuasive witness than Mr O'Leary and I therefore find as a fact that the version of events given by the plaintiff is what occurred,' Kelly said. ‘I reject Mr O'Leary's assertion that he was not hostile or aggressive or bullying towards the plaintiff. I find that he was.' The judge also indicated he was wise to O'Leary's media games. ‘The whole event was designed to, and did in fact attract enormous publicity,' he said, in a written judgment.

‘I think of all the things that Ryanair has done this was one of them with the fewest upsides,' says Jeans. ‘I think we just looked mean, which we were. We looked vindictive, which we were. And the individuals involved, myself and Michael, came out of it with no credit whatsoever.'

Those close to O'Leary say that privately he recognized the case had been a mistake, but felt it was an unavoidable one. It is a position that O'Leary still clings to. No matter the bad publicity, no matter the perception of meanness and vindictiveness, he still believes he had no choice. And he also claims that his position was proved correct. ‘For three days we got the worst publicity any company has ever had in its life, our bookings soared by 30 per cent day by day by day,' he claims. ‘The more we were in court the bigger the bookings were.'

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.'