Donlon believes that it was always Tony’s relationship with his sons that helped keep his head above water. ‘He was close to his three boys all the time. They were his lifelong friends.’
Certainly it was true that when Tony’s children, particularly Cathal and Declan, had been younger the family had not been his priority. He had been flying hundreds of thousands of miles every year in order to build up his business, and often the family was based on different continents. Amid such instability Tony’s priority for his children had been to provide them with an outstanding education at Clongowes and to root them firmly in Ireland.
Yet, for all the separation this involved, outsiders like Donlon were often struck by the incredibly close relationship that Tony enjoyed with all three boys in adulthood. According to Gerry Power,
you could argue that while Tony was at GPA and travelling all over the world … perhaps he neglected his family somewhat, because he was away all the time. But when he left Kilboy to go to Lyons, from then on he spent so much time with the three lads—a lot more, in fact, than when they were younger. They all got on really well together.
On one level Tony’s loneliness and isolation might well have been exacerbated by the move to Co. Kildare, where he didn’t have the deep roots and associations of Tipperary. Yet the crucial element for him was that his children had homes in Kildare and its neighbouring counties.
Friends noticed how each of the boys, in their different characters, seemed to reflect aspects of their father’s own character. ‘I overheard Tony say that once,’ Power recalls. ‘Somebody asked him about his children, and he said, “Well, Cathal is the playboy and real fun, Declan is the serious one with a magnificent heart, and Shane is the innocent”.’
Where Tony had been tough as a father when they were younger, in later life he seemed genuinely happy to help establish his children in whatever fulfilled them. The CDS Trust would make each of them independently wealthy, but Tony’s initial impetus in setting up that arrangement had been at least in part to give his boys something to build up and run themselves.
Declan inherited his father’s entrepreneurial streak. They worked closely together on Ryanair, and Declan would eventually run Irelandia, the private investment vehicle of the Ryan family. When Cathal and Shane pursued other interests, Tony seemed unconcerned and instead set them up in following their passion for horses. Cathal managed Swordlestown stud farm in Co. Kildare, and Shane would run Castleton Lyons. It was made clear to all three brothers that their relationship with each other and with their father mattered more to him than almost anything else. ‘He instilled in all of us the importance of family and how important good relations were,’ Declan says. ‘In the end he got very close to all of us.’
Another great bonus of the move to Lyons was that it was only ten miles or so from Clongowes Wood, where many of his grandchildren were studying. Tony seemed to take a genuine pleasure in his grandchildren and was uncharacteristically soft on them. ‘I remember giving out to my son when he was ten or so,’ remembers Declan, ‘and Tony said to me, “You’re being very harsh on him,” and I thought to myself, Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!’
For that reason Tony’s grandchildren adored him. Cathal’s son, Cillian, says that he was
far from a ‘Werther’s Original’ granddad, but he knew the stuff that was important to you at five years old, or fifteen, or twenty-five. He grew with you. Sometimes, two months down the line, he would ask me about something I’d said and I would think, You have all this other stuff on your plate and yet you know what’s important to me. It was touching, and that was how he built relationships with all of us. He knew what was going on in your life and was able to relate to it.
Cillian’s sister, Danielle, agrees. ‘He was always doing something, but he always found time to indulge us.’
Often those treats also gave Tony’s grandchildren a real insight into his character. In March 1999 he helped the sixteen-year-old Cillian mitch from school to fly to New York to watch a world heavyweight title fight between Evander Holyfield and Lennox Lewis. They flew first class across the Atlantic and arrived at Madison Square Garden in good time, only to be told that their tickets were fake. Cillian recalls that he had
never seen granddad in any kind of business meeting, but I got a glimpse of it when the guy said to get out of the line. Granddad just turned round to this huge monster of a man and said, ‘Young man, I have flown all the way from Dublin to be here with my grandson—the last thing I would have done is buy a dodgy ticket. You have two choices: you can let me in, or I can make you let me in. Which is it going to be?’ He stood his ground and, amazingly, the guy apologised and let us in.
There was just such an assurance about him—so much confidence in the way that he did it. That always stuck in my mind, because he wasn’t going to be intimidated by size or location or the matter in hand. It was a man who was saying, ‘This is going to happen my way.’ I was really impressed by that, and of course we then had a ball and always had that connection between us afterwards.
Conor Ryan, Declan’s eldest son, has similar memories and recalls being struck by the informality that Tony cultivated with his grandchildren.
Staying with him was great, because you did all the things you wouldn’t be allowed to do at home. There were no boring, posh restaurants: it was staying in and eating in front of the sport on the television. If we went out it was to Harry Ramsden’s. He used to challenge us all to see if we could eat a whole ‘big meal’, which was absolutely huge.
As with Cillian, sport was the bond across the generations, and again the experience was telling for Conor.
I’d have gone to the hurling with him. That was when you saw the real man—there was so much passion. If you’re from Tipperary, then hurling is in your blood. But it was more than that: it was about the importance of remembering who you are and where you came from.
As Tony himself said, ‘Hurling is a game that demands soul!’ Declan Ryan believes that Tony was generous with the grandchildren because he appreciated having a second chance. ‘He’d not had enough time to spend with his own kids, but when the grandkids came along he had more time,’ Declan says. ‘So he really learnt that lesson.’
It might have been the moral for Tony’s post-IPO life: the second time round he was going to stop and smell the roses.
Chapter 14
‘RYANAIR IS TERRIFIC’
By the mid-1990s, having freed himself from the nightmare of personal debt that followed GPA’s failed IPO, Tony Ryan was relishing spending more time with his family and indulging his passion for architecture and the decorative arts. But the desire to remake his mark—and money—in the world of business remained intense. His accession to the board of Ryanair as incoming chairman in 1995 was a signal that he was back in the game. The chairmanship may have been a non-executive role, but to Tony that simply meant a focus on strategy, without the aggravation of day-to-day operations. Intellectually and emotionally, as the majority owner, he was more committed than ever to making a success of the airline.
To announce his presence on the new board, Tony convened a gathering at Kilboy with Declan Ryan, Cathal Ryan and Michael O’Leary, and circulated an aide-mémoire to fellow-directors in advance of his first meeting in March 1995. ‘Ryanair is terrific’ ran the subject line. It was a blueprint—or a command—for how he expected the airline to conduct itself. ‘I set out hereunder random thoughts as to how to raise the profile of Ryanair and convince the public that the airline offers true quality travel and value,’ it began. ‘After many years of negative rumours—old aircraft, Romanian pilots, poor punctuality, unacceptable service, bad manners from handling agents together with serious questions on its financial viability—Ryanair needs to address its branding and project the airline as it is managed today.’ Obviously, ‘cost cutting is of paramount importance’. However, ‘a lean, well organised company’ also had to ‘command respect and gain the confidence of the traveller’. That mean
t such priorities as ‘safety, value, cleanliness, friendliness, punctuality’. Ryanair had to get itself ‘a smart image’. This would require ‘a concentrated effort by everyone’ at the airline. ‘I believe Ryanair is terrific,’ he concluded, but ‘we must make the public believe that Ryanair is terrific.’ One way to do that was to become the airline that ‘again carries a little humour’. For Tony that was a return to the theme that had been present from the outset: Ryanair had to show its customers a smiling, cheerful face.
As well as striving to impress customers, Tony was hopeful that the airline might now attract a suitor. In 1990 the senior management team had engaged in talks with British Airways about a possible investment, and when the issue came up once again, in an informal conversation between Tony and the new BA chairman, Lord Marshall, the process began again.
Declan Ryan was frankly sceptical about BA’s intentions. ‘Unfortunately I believe BA will show interest’, he warned in April 1995, ‘but will not take any action.’
Nevertheless, talks began in earnest that month, with Tony indicating that the Ryan family ‘would be open to accepting an offer from BA’, adding that there was ‘the real possibility of taking the airline [Ryanair] public in a year or two.’
After nine months of negotiation, BA announced that it had reached a ‘firm view’ to invest. Then, as Declan Ryan had predicted, the deal began to unravel. Tony reported that BA’s chief executive, Bob Ayling, frankly admitted at a one-on-one meeting that he was ‘nervous’ of Tony’s ‘negotiation reputation’. It was the prelude to a messy tussle, inevitably about money. Tony wrote to Ayling on 2 May: ‘Unfortunately our teams have still not concluded all the commercial points but more vitally we still have not agreed on price.’
At the start of the negotiations, Tony had ‘tentatively concurred’ to sell 25 per cent of Ryanair to BA for £26 million, adding that ‘the vendors would retain all cash as of date of completion.’ That represented significant cash in hand for Tony and his family at a time when his personal reserves had been depleted by the failed GPA flotation. However, as negotiations dragged on, Tony began to accuse BA of attempting to erode Ryanair’s position, in effect of devaluing its worth. Tony told Ayling he had ‘deliberately but reluctantly stayed clear of the negotiations and minutiae of contracts’ but was ‘unhappy to note your negotiating team’s efforts to downstate all our profits going forward.’ In all, he believed that BA had reduced the value of the business by £40–50 million. ‘Quite simply,’ Declan Ryan told the BA negotiators, ‘we are not prepared to concede any further in this area.’
On 26 May, Tony wrote to Ayling to bring discussions to an end, noting that ‘our position was being further eroded as the negotiations progressed.’ At the end of the day, Ryanair negotiators had found BA peremptory and arrogant in its belief that Ryanair was to be seen as a dodgy upstart that needed to be subsumed into the BA global empire. As Declan told their negotiators, ‘perhaps our fundamental understandings of the deal were different from the outset.’
If the mutual misunderstanding needed a symbol it was surely the glossary of terms BA felt it necessary to provide on its flights across the Atlantic for passengers watching The Commitments, set in working-class Dublin. Tony kept it in his briefcase thereafter.
Tony was disappointed when the BA deal collapsed, not only because it would have netted him a large cash payment but also because of the lost brand and credibility. Nevertheless he was undeterred in his strategy. Ryanair’s position ‘has not fundamentally changed’, he wrote after talks with BA concluded. ‘Our preferred option is to divest of a significant portion of equity and align the airline with a strategic partner.’
Indeed that strategy was already under way. While Tony had been negotiating with BA, he was simultaneously engaged in talks with its biggest competitor, Virgin. At the end of 1995 David Bonderman, a founding partner of Texas Pacific Group and a legend on Wall Street, met Declan Ryan to propose a 51 per cent takeover of Ryanair. ‘We would contemplate that the new controlling shareholders would be a group led by Richard Branson [of Virgin] and ourselves,’ Bonderman confirmed afterwards to Tony. ‘The game plan going forward would be to change the name of the airline to use the Virgin brand and expand into continental Europe while retaining as much of the existing cost structure, method of operations and management as possible.’
In January 1996, as talks rambled on with BA, Michael O’Leary met representatives of the TPG consortium to discuss ‘Project Virgo’. At the end of the meeting Jeremy Ferris of TPG sought to ‘establish a schedule of action from here’. His idea was that they should ‘do a selling job’ on Virgin to ‘get [them] comfortable’ with the idea of dealing with Ryanair. The fly in the ointment, O’Leary reported back to Tony, was that, while Bonderman ‘wants to do this deal’, Branson and Virgin were ‘highly distrustful of TAR’. There was ‘still a nervousness towards the Ryan factor’ after the GPA debacle. O’Leary’s strategy was to ‘play down the Ryan involvement quite heavily at the meeting, explaining that the airline was run by the management with no interference from the family for the past five years, and emphasising that the family had been fully supportive of the low-cost, no-frills policy at every stage over the past five years.’
It was a clever, if patently misleading, tack, but the exchange sowed the seed in O’Leary’s mind that Tony’s reputation was irreparably damaged in Britain. That sense was confirmed when the talks with Virgin, like those with BA, collapsed amid a general sense that Tony and Ryanair were too tricky as potential partners. ‘Even more,’ Declan Ryan suggests, ‘they just didn’t believe Ryanair could be a success.’
The tenor of the cross-channel relationship was neatly captured the following year in a fax O’Leary received from Branson taking him to task for saying his airline Virgin Express was losing money. ‘Dear Michael,’ it said. ‘Bollocks! Kind Regards, Richard.’ When Tony saw the fax, he immediately fired one back in kind. ‘Dear Richard, The correct spelling is Bollix. Warmest regards, Tony.’ The fax was accompanied by a cutting from the Times (London) reporting on a new dictionary of Irish slang in which the word ‘bollix’ had been highlighted. It was yet one more example of Anglo-Irish misunderstanding.
That sense of cultural dissonance had forcefully struck Bonderman, one of the principal actors in the failed Ryanair-Virgin talks.
I suppose we should have known the thousand years of history. The British and the Irish sides did not get along swimmingly in the context of this deal. I never discussed their actual thoughts, but it was clear that the British thought the Irish were a bunch of hayseeds and the Irish thought the British were a bunch of snobs, so they were not going to get along together in any respect. Branson and the Irish seemed not to stand each other. The whole deal fell apart and nothing happened.
Declan Ryan remembers that at the first Ryanair board meeting with the TPG directors Bonderman ‘asked us about the different use of the word “bollocks”. We told him there were at least six different uses, with the most positive being “the dog’s bollocks”. The Americans were in stitches of laughter with that definition!’
While Branson may not have seemed to like Tony and Ryanair, Bonderman certainly did—and not just for the humour.
We thought it was an interesting business model. It was small and it was rapidly growing, which is the right time to buy into something, when it’s just starting. So when Tony called me up and said, ‘There’s a new game plan. Would you be interested in a minority investment?’ I said I would be interested in that under certain circumstances.
Those circumstances were that ‘we had to have some influence over what happened.’
In effect, the conversation with Bonderman was the moment Tony let go of Ryanair. ‘Because of GPA, the airline could not go public with Tony,’ Bonderman recalls. ‘As a result, the deal was that I would become chairman and would take the company public.’
Afterwards, rumours circulated that Tony was ousted from the Ryanair chairmanship against his will. Bonderman fat
ly contradicts that assessment.
Tony was a shrewd, smart guy. He absolutely understood that he couldn’t be seen to be in control of the shareholding and be chairman if Ryanair was going public. That’s why he was interested in doing this deal. He called me up and said, ‘You become chairman and the public face of the company going public.’
Any resentment Tony felt seems to have been directed not against Bonderman but against O’Leary. Tony had initiated the move to step away from the chairmanship. However, he didn’t take kindly to O’Leary’s suggestion that he should leave the board altogether. ‘We needed to get rid of the Ryans,’ O’Leary says, ‘or at least downplay Tony and the rest of the Ryan influence, if we were going to seriously float the company on the London Stock Exchange. It was only a few years from the GPA mess, so Tony can’t float it. You have to take the Ryans down.’
Declan Ryan remembers events differently, pointing out that, aside from the family being majority shareholders, Tony had full support from the new chairman. Bonderman says the spat between Tony and O’Leary was just like a ‘father-and-son situation, where the father is still in charge and the son is trying to come out on his own.’ Ultimately Bonderman thought Ryanair needed both men, because even if ‘they fought like cats and dogs’ the pair remained ‘a great combination’.
Tony stayed on the board, but friends knew he had been personally wounded by O’Leary’s attempt to oust him. ‘Tony was quite hurt,’ judges Denis O’Brien, ‘but he put it to one side, which was very unusual for him.’
Only occasionally did friends get a hint of what lay beneath. There had been ‘traumatic times when your support was critical for one’s sanity,’ Tony wrote at about this time to Gerry McEvoy, his friend and personal accountant. ‘There have also been dark and awkward moments in the life of Ryanair.’
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