Tony Ryan

by Richard Aldous

  The idea for developing Baldonnel was not new. In 1986 Fine Gael’s spokesperson on transport and tourism, Gay Mitchell, had put forward a similar proposal as a means to ‘relieve congestion’ at Dublin Airport and help redevelop ‘an unemployment black spot’. Although Fine Gael had been in office at the time, the idea failed to gain any momentum within the coalition Government. Subsequently a decision was made to expand capacity at Dublin Airport by building a second terminal.

  By the time Tony took up the idea, in 1995, he hoped that circumstances might be more propitious. The Minister for Transport, Michael Lowry, was a fellow-Tipp man, and, although they weren’t particularly close, Tony was essentially taking a Fine Gael idea to him. On 18 May, Tony received the pamphlet ‘Dublin City Airport’ and immediately despatched one to Lowry’s house in Tipperary.

  The concept was launched on Pat Kenny’s show on RTE two days later and marked the beginning of a round of media interviews to drum up support for the idea. That fact alone demonstrated Tony’s commitment to the project. Although he would very occasionally venture out onto the RTE News or give the odd interview to a journalist, Tony didn’t like or seek the media spotlight. This meant he was often not the best advocate for his own ideas or projects, as had been seen during the run-up to the IPO in 1992, when journalists had observed how he bridled under questioning about the health of GPA. That Tony was now prepared to appear on a ‘magazine’ talk show with Kenny, who was bound to ask questions about how he had been affected by the GPA collapse, signalled to those who knew him well that Baldonnel, like Ryanair, was a project involving the heart as well as the head.

  Tony handled the inevitable GPA questions with a lightness of touch that he rarely displayed when dealing with the media. He told how, after the failed flotation, he had gone to Spain to recover and had spent his time running up and down the beach to lose weight. ‘Some asked later how much I lost,’ he now joked, ‘and I said, “Three hundred million dollars, and twenty pounds”.’

  Press reaction to the Baldonnel scheme was overwhelmingly positive. So too was opinion in the Baldonnel area. Tony commissioned Lansdowne Market Research to poll local people on the issue, and it showed that 80 per cent of those asked believed that the airport would bring new jobs into the area. Only 14 per cent opposed the idea, on the grounds of additional noise and traffic.

  Tony bombarded ministers and TDs with brochures and personal letters. The Minister for Finance, Ruairí Quinn, replied encouragingly, ‘I spoke to Declan [Ryan] about this’, adding that he would ‘be in touch with you soon’. A meeting with the minister followed in the Department of Finance in June. Hugh Coveney, the soon-to-be-demoted Minister for Defence, with oversight of the airfield, also confirmed that ‘in principle, I think it’s an excellent concept.’

  Similarly, many in the business world sensed an opportunity. Michael Smurfit wrote to say that the project was ‘very imaginative and one which I would support 100 per cent.’ He promised to raise the matter ‘when I meet with the ministers.’ Tony was also able to tell the minister himself that he had been ‘approached by a major Irish developer [Tom Roche, Snr, of CRH] who wished to invest in the project.’

  Lowry suggested that Tony should meet Derek Keogh, chief executive of Aer Rianta, ‘to endeavour to find a possible working relationship.’ At that meeting Tony outlined how ‘the Ryanair Group and its investors would build a larger passenger terminal at Baldonnel’ than the proposed new terminal at Dublin Airport. The development would represent an estimated saving for the state of £300–400 million. There would be no disruption to Dublin Airport. The aim of the new venture would be to ‘allow Ryanair to continue to offer low fares both to the UK and in the near future to the continent.’

  Ryanair had long endured a testy relationship with Aer Rianta, but the meeting was surprisingly amicable, and Tony and Keogh agreed jointly to commission a British company familiar with airport development to carry out a feasibility study.

  On 21 July, following a meeting at the Department of Transport, Lowry told Tony to investigate the physical and aeronautical feasibility of the project. His own department would ‘address the fundamental issues … which the Baldonnel concept throws up’, not least ‘whether a second commercial airport for the Dublin area is necessary or desirable now or at any time in the future.’

  Six months later the minister gave his answer by fax. After ‘consulting my cabinet colleagues,’ he wrote on 24 January, ‘my conclusion is that the project would not be in the interests of the aviation sector and the economy generally.’ He also enclosed his press release, which contended that Dublin Airport ‘has the capacity to cater for traffic demand for several decades’ and that ‘views which have been expressed about an alleged high cost base at Dublin Airport are not borne out by recent independent studies.’ Privately Tony was informed that the Department of Finance didn’t want competition for Baldonnel.

  Tony was incensed, retorting that

  Ryanair’s concern is cost, and Dublin continues to be Ryanair’s most expensive airport. Having an Aer Rianta monopoly at Irish airports is bad for aviation and tourism development. Ryanair must now fundamentally review its future to recognise that its growth will be restrained by this monopoly.

  To Mary Harney, leader of the PDs and a supporter of the Baldonnel project, he wrote that ‘the spurious arguments put up by the Government press office and in particular Aer Rianta are most irritating.’ Harney issued her own press release warning that ‘Ireland is in danger of losing Ryanair’. That was never going to be the case. Nevertheless, the decision would be part of a process that would see Ryanair move the base of its operations from Dublin to Stansted Airport, which soon provided the airline with its own new state-of-the-art terminal.

  Tony never liked to let an idea rest and would return to the Baldonnel project again. ‘I am beginning to believe the writings of Machiavelli,’ he wrote, half amused, to one correspondent, as if he had ever doubted the Italian. Yet, for now, it was enough that he was back to his old self, on the charge once more after an unhappy period in embattled retreat. A profile in the Irish Times had noted that ‘Mr Ryan seems mellower’ after the experience of GPA. The Sunday Tribune got closer to the mark. Tony’s Baldonnel project, it suggested that January, ‘has grand sweep and is based on strong forecasts for airline passenger growth larded with a large helping of public relations.’ That was ‘typical of the man’, it concluded. ‘The grand vision explains the epic scale of his successes and his failures.’

  Chapter 13

  IN THE LION’S DOMAIN

  Dublin Airport, 2 February 1996

  It must have been quite some sight. As early morning commuters rushed hither and thither inside the airport terminal, there at the Ryanair desk, check-in staff in Moorish attire greeted passengers for what was clearly not an ordinary flight. Irish consumers had become so used to Ryanair’s witty advertising gimmicks that most commuters doubtless assumed that these elaborate costumes were part of yet another attention-grabbing stunt. Others might have noticed that all the passengers seemed to know each other, so perhaps it was some kind of corporate junket. In a way, they were right, for these gathering passengers were all members of a very particular club: the friends of Tony Ryan. And they were off to Marrakesh to celebrate his sixtieth birthday.

  The themed events continued on board, as belly dancers emerged from the galley of the Ryanair jet to shimmy their way down the aisle. At the controls was Tony’s son Cathal, who, once they were airborne, announced over the intercom that the flight had been diverted to Lagos due to bad weather. The destination was a joke, although the weather was not: thick fog around Marrakesh Airport made landing extremely difficult. Just as they were coming in, Cathal came back on to announce that Tony was now at the controls and that they should all start praying.

  Marrakesh itself stubbornly refused to join in the celebratory mood. ‘We had been told to bring our summer gear, because there will be swimming and so on, but when we got to Marrakesh it was more l
ike Knock,’ Ed Walsh recalls. ‘So we had lunch in miserable rain and then got back on another three-and-a-half-hour flight back.’

  Ann Reihill was another guest on the trip. ‘It rained the whole time we were there,’ she wryly concludes, ‘so we might as well have been in Dublin at the Burlington Hotel.’

  The weather may have been a disappointment, but the birthday trip to Marrakesh was in so many ways a return to form for Tony. This festive event was the kind of occasion the ‘old’, pre-IPO Tony might have put on—extravagant, brash and tongue-in-cheek. It was a sign to his friends and the wider world that the chutzpah was back, as well as being an indicator of what was financing it. Ryanair was Tony’s airline; it was the key to the restoration of his fortunes. Now he didn’t care who knew it.

  If Tony’s sixtieth birthday celebrations demonstrated that the exuberance had returned, that self-confidence also found an outlet in one of the most ambitious projects of his life. Over the years, initially encouraged by Miranda Guinness, Tony had taken a growing interest in architecture and the decorative arts. By the mid-1990s he had developed not only great enthusiasm but also considerable expertise, particularly in the eighteenth-century style.

  ‘He had the most extraordinary eye,’ says his friend the architect John Meagher, who noticed how these aspects had over the years come to matter the most to Tony. This was particularly the case during the unhappy period working for General Electric after the failed share offering for GPA. ‘He adored the whole business of aircraft,’ says Meagher, ‘but he was just bored with pushing paper and money around the table. It is almost as if he felt … he wanted to build something. In many ways he was a frustrated architect, so he started looking for something to put his energy into in order to satisfy that.’

  Another friend, Ken Rohan, who was on the board of the National Gallery, agrees with that assessment. ‘It was part of Tony’s bold character to use his wealth to engage in a huge project to restore a great house to how it would have been.’

  The project that Tony settled on in 1996 was Lyons Demesne (predictably near the N7 road to Tipperary), the eighteenth-century residence of Lord Cloncurry, on the Dublin-Kildare border. The original house had been designed by Oliver Grace in the 1790s and was then considerably remodelled by Richard Morrison in the early nineteenth century. Among the glories of the house were the frescoes by the Italian painter Gaspare Gabrielli, whose landscapes formed part of what were generally considered to be the finest interiors of any residence in Ireland. The house was set in a glorious estate of about 600 acres, with formal gardens and rich, fertile land. The north-west of the estate was bounded by the Grand Canal. From the house, elegant lawns swept down to the spring-fed lake set against the imposing background of Lyons Hill. In the middle of the twentieth century this beautiful pastoral setting would inspire the English poet Sir John Betjeman to write an ode to the lake after staying at the house.

  However, by the time the Ryan family bought the Lyons estate it had fallen into serious disrepair. For most of the previous thirty years it had been an outpost of the Faculty of Agriculture at University College, Dublin, whose farm was nearby. Laboratories had been set up in the grand reception rooms. Partitions had gone into the bedrooms. The grounds were overgrown. The most grievous wound was to the Gabrielli frescoes, which were covered with wallpaper paste and lining paper. ‘When I bought Lyons Demesne in 1996, parts of it were in close to ruinous condition,’ Tony wrote, ‘yet it seemed to possess an indomitable spirit that challenged restoration or retreat. I chose the former.’

  Tony now threw himself fearlessly into the mammoth project of reconstruction. He was involved in every stage of the meticulous process of restoration that took place, and he had a constant presence in the house as the work was being done. ‘We encountered many surprises along the way,’ Tony recalled, ‘a myriad terrifying examples of decay or neglect, every now and again wonderfully relieved by discoveries such as that of the beautiful ceiling in the Family Room.’ In addition to re-roofing and the replication of floors, window sashes and plasterwork, the restoration attempted to adapt the original structure to twentieth-century living. No detail was too small for attention: the rear elevation, remodelled in keeping with the period detail on the front façade, was constructed using the same mellow granite quarried from the original source near Blessington in Co. Wicklow. Tony was even said to have recruited the head gardener from Versailles to restore the grounds, much to the astonishment of his friend Seán Donlon, who had arranged a visit to France simply for Tony to look at the gardens.

  Perhaps the greatest thrill of all for Tony came in furnishing the house. ‘He was always engrossed in plans or a stack of catalogues from the leading auctioneers around the world,’ remembers John Meagher. ‘He would go through them meticulously and would mark what he thought the value was for the things he was interested in.’ Tony’s idea was to buy Irish furniture that had been sold over the years and had gone abroad. He brought items back and stored them in warehouses. Meagher recalls that

  the day he was going to move into Lyons, I remember him standing on the steps with a clipboard with about fifty pages on it. When something came out of a truck he’d say, ‘What number is that? Okay, that’s a gilt chair, and it goes on the right-hand side of the bed in the third bedroom on the second floor.’ He knew every single thing. He knew where everything was going and had planned it all. It was amazing.

  When the restoration was completed, Hugh Montgomery-Massingbird, the renowned expert on the ‘Great House’, judged that Tony had ‘accomplished the largest, most ambitious and exhaustive programme of restoration ever undertaken in a private capacity in the history of the Irish state.’

  Lyons Demesne would give pleasure to Tony for the rest of his life. Later he would redevelop the nearby village of Lyons, which had been burnt by English soldiers in 1641, with new houses, shops and restaurants. The small, ruined parish church dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary was also redeveloped and in the end would be Tony’s final resting place—a symbol of how much Lyons truly had become ‘home’.

  ——

  There would be one other major restoration project for Tony, although of a very different kind. Shortly after finishing Lyons Demesne he bought Castleton Farm in Lexington, Kentucky, amid the rolling savannas known as the Bluegrass. It was one of the world’s great centres for the breeding of thoroughbred horses and in its own way was steeped in as much tradition as Lyons Demesne. Tony ridd the 1,200-acre estate Castleton Lyons to make the connection with the one in Co. Kildare.

  He planted two thousand trees and renovated the many dilapidated outbuildings. A bridge was built across the lake, and nineteenth-century English ironwork gates set in Kentucky limestone were installed at the farm entrance. The Greek Revival mansion, built in 1841, was restored to its former elegance, with mahogany floors restained and plasterwork restored to the ceilings. Paintings and furnishings from Tony’s collection in Ireland were brought to the United States, which combined to give the house a remarkable similarity to the interior of Lyons.

  The interior of both houses had been designed by Tiggy Butler, with whom Tony had at one stage been romantically involved.

  One of the most striking aspects of Tony’s relationships was the way in which, more often than not, he was able to break them off without any bad feeling on either side. Occasionally friends would hear stories about a messy exit, but most of the time Tony managed to retain a friendship with those he loved. After Tony’s funeral, in 2007, Denis O’Brien recalls hosting a dinner for Martine Head, Tony’s partner when he died, and his ‘exes’ Miranda Guinness and Louise Kennedy. ‘They were telling mad stories, because it had all been in Tony’s character,’ he says. ‘Of course he had been very difficult, but somehow he managed to leave them all still loving him anyway.’

  Meshing these relationships into family life could sometimes be tricky, particularly with the feelings of Tony’s estranged wife, Mairéad, to be considered. Yet, for much of the time, life simply went o
n, and everyone seems to have muddled along. Cathal Ryan’s son, Cillian, for example, remembers happy times at Christmas as a child down in Kilboy, opening presents alongside the children of Miranda Guinness. Ireland itself was going through a quiet social revolution, and the realities of second relationships applied as much behind the walls of Kilboy and Lyons as they did anywhere else in the country.

  Friends noticed that those realities, particularly when Tony was between relationships, could at times leave him lonely and prone to bouts of depression. ‘When he started living at Lyons,’ says Seán Donlon, ‘if I was driving back from Dublin I’d phone him and say, “Tony, I’ll be passing near Lyons in half an hour.” And sometimes he was there and sometimes not, but a lot of the time—and people should never underestimate this—he was lonely.’

  Michael O’Leary has a different view. ‘Tony was very mercurial,’ he says, ‘and people like that, who are geniuses, they must have long nights of the soul. But Tony was never a depressive: he was a fighter. The easiest thing at this stage in his life would have been to roll over and die, but he never, ever did that.’

  Certainly as Tony got older he found it increasingly difficult to sleep, and he started taking medication. His friend and financial adviser, Fergus Armstrong, remembers going to Lyons on one occasion only to find Tony half exasperated, half amused. He hadn’t slept at all the previous night. Having been advised to put up extra security gates not long beforehand, he had found himself locked behind a barrier and unable to get out to the car in which he had left a briefcase that contained his sleeping tablets. It was the ultimate image, Armstrong reflected, of a great tycoon trapped in his elaborate palace.