Tony’s response to this situation was an action plan to put the National Gallery on stronger financial footing. It was a radical proposal that included ‘privatising a small percentage of the gallery’ and ‘selling off art that the director and the board would regard as not being of significant importance.’ The result would be that the gallery would ‘benefit from refurbishment and improved facilities and in addition would gain from having new surroundings and paintings on display in terms of attracting more visitors and promoting art to a wider audience.’
The idea went nowhere, with the chairman, Bill Finlay, refusing even to put it on the agenda for a board meeting. GPA’s Seán Donlon, who, as a former secretary-general of the Department of Foreign Affairs, understood politics in the public sector better than most, told Tony sadly afterwards, ‘You have obviously invested a good deal of time in fulfilling the obligations imposed on you by your appointment to the board, but it is becoming very clear that the prospects of your being able to achieve what is needed through continuing your active membership are, at best, remote.’
Tony concurred and wrote to the Taoiseach in 1988 to resign. ‘The Gallery now is leaderless’, he explained, and ‘in a rather sorry structural state’. Meetings were spent on ‘total triviality’. There was no point in staying. The two men met the following week, and Haughey, despite Tony having been appointed by Garret FitzGerald, persuaded him not to resign by promising that Pádraig Ó hUiginn, secretary-general of the Department of the Taoiseach, would ‘monitor the situation’ and ensure ‘visible action’ at the gallery.
In reality Tony would have preferred an opportunity to become chairman of the board, but a businessman in charge would have been a step too far for the gallery. Tony remained on the board for eight years. His disillusionment became even stronger when he came to believe that the gallery wanted him to fund their new Millennium Wing.
He declined the opportunity and instead directed his efforts towards a new museum in Limerick to house the fine collection of John and Gertrude Hunt. That project, too, would come at a moment of major upheaval in Tony’s life, and, just as in 1982, art would offer an immediate release from the dramas of GPA.
One unexpected side-effect of Tony’s emergence as a cultural figure in the early 1980s was a dramatic change of image. It might have been a rebranding; perhaps it was a mid-life crisis. Either way, it seemed like a visible sign of renewed confidence and individuality after the setbacks over Irelandia and the resignation fiasco, as well as a demonstration of a new artistic sensibility. Out went the dark, pinstripe three-piece suits he had worn around the world; in came a succession of expensive cream linen suits. Black lace-ups were succeeded by natty Gucci loafers. Plain white shirts were replaced with striped pastels, with fashionable contrasting white colours.
The change caused sartorial panic in certain quarters at GPA, as staff members, wanting to ape the boss, felt the need to experiment with their own dress. There were a few unsuccessful attempts to mimic Tony’s new flamboyant image; most settled for wearing a billowing silk handkerchief in their top pocket, as Tony himself now did.
The effect of Tony’s new image was striking, and it made an immediate impact on those encountering him for the first time. The lawyer Robert Greenspon, who was recruited to GPA from the United States in 1984, remembers the day he met Tony.
Maurice Foley had put on a lunch at his house on the shores of Lough Derg. We all went out to meet a boat coming up the Shannon, and there on the bow was this figure in a white suit, with a flower in his lapel and wearing a bright-red tie. It reminded me of [the writer] Tom Wolfe and had the same kind of impact. This was definitely someone out of the ordinary. You don’t meet many people like that in the business world. So I knew I was going to like Tony Ryan straight away, even if I also sensed that he was going to make life interesting, to say the least.
Tony’s change of direction in 1982 was about more than a new set of clothes: it was a shift in how he saw himself. He had made the transition from Aer Lingus employee to successful CEO, but in doing so he had acquired an entrepreneurial frame of mind. That was not something that could be contained within the confines of GPA and its relationship with Aer Lingus. His first attempt to break out—Irelandia—had failed, or was at least dormant. A venture into cultural politics with the Forum for Business and the Arts was an interesting diversion but not one to exploit his entrepreneurial drive. What Tony desperately wanted by 1982 was a serious business opportunity. Instead what he settled on was ownership of the Sunday Tribune.
The ‘Trib’ had gone into liquidation that October after a disastrous attempt to launch a sister paper, the Daily News. A month later Tony bankrolled the purchase of the Sunday title for the sum of £5,000. To his colleagues it seemed an odd decision even at the time. ‘He told me what he was contemplating and asked what did I think,’ Jim King recalls. ‘I used McConnells [advertising agency] to give us an objective report. Their view was that it had limited prospects and that the competition for advertising revenue was so severe that the big established names like Independent Newspapers would almost certainly squeeze it out.’
In fact, Independent Newspapers was one of the reasons that Tony went ahead. Among his greatest skills when looking around for ideas was an ability to see what worked elsewhere and then give it his own unique twist. This had been the way he had transformed a salaried job leasing a couple of Aer Lingus Jumbos into a multimillion business. Later it would be how he would use the low-cost, no-frills model from the United States to create an airline that eventually became Europe’s biggest carrier.
In 1982 everything was more personal. The Sunday Tribune, suggests Michael O’Leary, later CEO of Ryanair, ‘was all about trying to do down Tony O’Reilly and have political clout. He had to buy a newspaper because O’Reilly had a newspaper.’
The two Tonys, both born in 1936, would endure a fractious and competitive relationship over the coming decades. Yet if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery there can be little doubt that Tony Ryan admired the way in which O’Reilly had established himself as the most well-known businessman in Ireland. In part that high public profile was due to O’Reilly’s international rugby career, which gave him an identity outside business. He had made his money by rising through the ranks to become chief executive (and later chairman) of the American food giant Heinz. In the early 1970s O’Reilly bought all the voting shares in Independent Newspapers, giving him a further public profile as the proprietor of the mass-circulation Irish Independent and Sunday Independent.
Later, after being awarded several honorary doctorates, the GPA founder would style himself ‘Dr Tony Ryan’ in imitation of Dr Tony O’Reilly, who held a PhD in agricultural marketing. Now he imitated him with the purchase of a national newspaper. Tony’s misfortune was to choose to do so with the brilliant but combustible Vincent Browne.
‘We didn’t get on in business, because we are too alike,’ Browne wrote with typical candour after Tony’s death. ‘Not that I had any of his entrepreneurial genius or his energy, but we were similar temperamentally: stubborn (just a tad on my part), short-tempered (just a tinge on my part), sometimes irrational (very occasionally on my part).’
Browne had approached Tony in the autumn of 1982 about the possibility of buying into the Tribune, with Browne himself as editor. The initial outlay for the title may have been just £5,000, but the estimated cost to relaunch the paper was closer to ten times that amount. The first edition was due to come out on 17 April 1983.
From the outset Tony’s relationship with Browne was fraught. To some extent this was Tony’s own fault. He had no experience in running a newspaper and never really understood the culture. A receptionist at the Tribune recalls Tony’s absolute bafflement on turning up early one morning at the newspaper’s office only to find the place entirely deserted other than herself. Browne played on this inexperience and for the next year drove Tony to exasperation.
It was inexperience that led Tony to make the beginner’s error
of not putting his own person in charge as managing director. In part this can be explained by the quality and reputation of the man Browne recruited for the job. John Kelleher was the highly respected controller of programmes at RTE1 television. To poach him from the state broadcaster was a coup for the newspaper, giving it immediate gravitas. But Kelleher was not Tony’s appointment, which immediately left the new proprietor on the back foot.
From day 1 there were problems at the Tribune. Browne was an outstanding journalist, but his editorial and management style has often been thought haphazard. ‘The Sunday Tribune is like “Dallas”,’ noted one reporter, referring to the popular 1980s television programme, ‘except that Browne’s editorial style is like JR, and his business acumen is closer to that of Cliff Barnes.’ Tony didn’t like either, and soon the proprietor and his editor were engaged in a series of rows that became legendary in media circles and beyond.
The Tribune in its earlier incarnation had been a sober affair, run by Conor Brady, who went on to edit the Irish Times. Browne brought a different approach. As the editor of Magill he had built a reputation for finding scoops, delivering outspoken and often outrageous editorials, and generally making a nuisance of himself with the political and financial establishment. The relaunched Tribune gave him the opportunity to play a similar game on a bigger stage. It quickly became a campaigning newspaper, week after week running stories such as ‘Free Nicky Kelly’ (a member of the Irish Republican Socialist Party convicted of the Sallins train robbery in Co. Kildare and who was subsequently given a presidential pardon). Many of the Tribune stories centred on the Provisional IRA, which had developed a relationship of trust in Browne. After several weeks of these stories, Tony began to worry that somehow he had got himself caught up with the IRA and that his newspaper was turning into the republican organisation’s newspaper of choice.
What tipped Tony over the edge, however, was an interview with the chief of staff of the INLA—a splinter group of the Official IRA (‘the Stickies’). Dominic ‘Mad Dog’ McGlinchey was by this stage the ‘most wanted man in Ireland’, and the following year he became the first republican extradited by the Irish state to the North. In November 1983, without consulting Tony, Browne interviewed McGlinchey at a safe house believed to be in Cork, where McGlinchey openly admitted to Browne that ‘we were involved mainly in the killing of UDR [Ulster Defence Regiment] men and policemen, and we did a fair few bombings of police barracks and towns. I don’t think a town wasn’t blown up. They all got a touch—Killalea, Bellaghy, Portglenone, Magherafelt, Maghera, Castledawson, Ballymena and lots of others.’
A friend recalls that when the interview was published Tony ‘went mad, because he mistakenly thought Vincent had republican sympathies.’ Tony’s son Declan believes that his father’s reaction might have been different if the strongly worded editorial that appeared inside the paper had been on the front page—‘although they probably would still have fallen out about it,’ he concludes.
Tony summoned Browne and Kelleher to his house in Wellington Road in Dublin for what turned out to be a spectacular confrontation. Present at that meeting was the young man Tony had just taken on as his first personal assistant, Denis O’Brien. A long-term acquaintance, Greg Jones, had written to Tony in January to recommend a friend’s son from Trinity Bank in Dublin who ‘seems to have the energy and personal attributes which you in the past looked for.’ Tony met him and was sufficiently impressed to give him a job. O’Brien would go on to become one of Ireland’s most significant entrepreneurs, building up a multi-billion telecoms business.
When Browne and Kelleher arrived for the meeting, O’Brien showed them into the living room, where they found Tony in a state of blind rage. O’Brien recalls that,
as they walked in, Tony said to Vincent, ‘You’re a fucking INLA cunt,’ and the next thing Tony swung at him. So Vincent then whacked him one, and they started to brawl. Johnny Kelleher was speechless, because he thought he was going to be CEO of a newspaper, instead of this kind of drama.
Browne records a slightly different series of events, admitting that the two men ‘squared up’ before being ‘dragged apart’ just as ‘a blow was about to be struck’. Either way, Tony’s relationship with Browne never recovered.
Kelleher soon left the newspaper. That departure left Browne as editor, managing director and financial controller. The results were not happy ones for Tony. There would often be phone calls to Kilboy on Friday evenings saying the paper couldn’t come out unless money for the printer was immediately made available. Ulster Bank would phone to say that the accounts didn’t balance for the week, with cheques going out for double the sums that were coming in.
Tony came to believe that there was some manipulation of the cash flow to engender a sense of crisis and get more money out of him. ‘Eventually’, O’Brien recalls, ‘Tony said to me, “Find somebody to go in and run that newspaper for me”.’ The man O’Brien suggested was his brother-in-law, the accountant Eugene O’Neill. After just a few weeks O’Neill reported back that he felt he could get no co-operation from Browne or the Tribune staff. ‘There was a mutiny against him,’ says O’Brien.
The showdown came at a meeting of the board in Kildare Street in June 1984, less than three months after the Sunday Tribune had relaunched. Most of those present were Tony’s appointees, including Peter Ledbetter and Arthur Walls (a future chairman of Ryanair) from GPA, Donal Flynn (Tony’s personal accountant), Denis O’Brien and Eugene O’Neill. Also present was the former Minister for External Affairs and chief of staff of the IRA, Seán MacBride, who was Browne’s mischievous appointment on the board. Tony had the numbers to do whatever he liked; the question was whether he had the will to keep going with the paper.
After initial business was out of the way O’Neill proposed that Browne be sacked, but he did it so nervously and timidly that it failed to register. ‘He so mistimed his intervention that nobody paid any attention,’ Browne says.
The next attempt, according to Browne, was better co-ordinated. O’Neill announced that the company was insolvent. Tony then said he would not invest any more money. Finally, Flynn announced that he was resigning as a director.
What followed was bedlam. MacBride theatrically pointed at Flynn and spat out the name ‘Schuschnigg’. That historical reference to the Austrian chancellor who had caved in to Hitler left most people nonplussed, but Flynn seemed to understand only too well. He rose from his chair to storm out, only to get stuck trying to squeeze past Arthur Walls. ‘Some of us—including Tony—were in fits of helpless laughter at the chaos of it all,’ says Browne. Amid the hubbub, Browne announced that he would buy the paper. Tony wearily concurred, having finally decided that the game wasn’t worth the candle.
As he left the meeting, however, all Tony’s anger and frustration at Browne suddenly spilled over. ‘Tony went mad,’ O’Brien recalls. He rushed at Browne, fists flying, but in the process gave a glancing blow to MacBride. In a performance worthy of his mother, the legendary Maud Gonne, MacBride went down like a pro, screaming in his famous lisping French accent, ‘He has hit me! He has hit me!’ Browne expressed ‘outrage’ and was ‘encouraged by a wink from Seán to join in the drama.’ Eventually Tony left the building, furious but glad to be rid of the entire commitment.
‘About a week later’, says O’Brien, ‘Vincent came down and we did a deal with him. That was that, and Vincent was off.’ Tony was glad to see the back of him and the paper, but his losses had been astronomical. Press reports suggested that Tony had lost about £600,000. ‘It was much more than that,’ O’Brien says. ‘He lost well over a million, if not more.’ Vincent Browne, O’Brien concludes, ‘was the only guy that out-negotiated Tony that I ever saw.’
The Tribune had been a disaster for Tony, yet despite the rage he demonstrated in his personal confrontations with Browne, he quickly moved on. ‘He had got into a furious temper about it,’ John Meagher says, ‘but then he just said, “That was a mistake,” and got rid of it in his hea
d.’
Tony’s ability to draw a line under misadventures was the counterpoint to the periods of ‘black dog’ depression he often suffered during periods of stasis. Meagher got to see both sides. At times, Tony could be morose, even silent, for days on end. On one occasion, when they were in Mexico for three weeks, Tony said almost nothing for ten days while he brooded on some unrelated problem. Meagher kept gabbling away at breakfast, lunch and dinner while Tony stared gloomily at the table. ‘He did suffer from some kind of depression,’ Meagher reflects. ‘Sometimes people who are very creative and live that kind of life—it sometimes comes with the territory.’
Meagher also saw the volcanic temper that lay beneath an essentially still façade. ‘I saw Tony in fights,’ he says, ‘not just one punch, lots of punches, big bust-ups. If somebody had annoyed or upset him he would just lose his rag totally and blow up and let them have it.’
Tony’s anger over the Tribune and his propensity to turn in on himself might have produced a retreat to Kilboy to lick his wounds. But instead he simply pressed delete and moved on. It was a characteristic that was perhaps among the most important features of his emotional armoury. Tony was never afraid of failure. His tempers and slides into depression often coincided with periods of frustration when projects weren’t going according to plan. Once they failed, however, the worrying stopped and he started thinking about other initiatives, which brought a corresponding lifting of his spirits.
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