Tony Ryan

by Richard Aldous

  Bonderman was not unsympathetic to these concerns, especially to that of convincing Declan Ryan to stay on the board. ‘As to Michael, I am in agreement,’ he admitted. ‘I am working on it, but you know Michael!’

  Looking back, Bonderman believes it was an irreconcilable difference of approach.

  Michael was and is concerned about costs, almost to the exclusion of anything else. Tony was much more concerned with image—the company’s and his own. Michael didn’t care about customer complaints. He dealt with them, but I think Tony thought you should run the business so well there shouldn’t be complaints. Michael was happy with the ‘cheap and cheerful’ slogan of Ryanair. But if it was just cheap and not so cheerful, he didn’t mind.

  Matters came to a head in the autumn of 2004. After another vociferous complaint from Tony about O’Leary’s behaviour, Bonderman sent an email saying he had spoken directly to O’Leary about the matter. ‘David was a good referee,’ concedes O’Leary, who had not taken kindly to being upbraided.

  Bonderman had urged restraint. ‘While Michael certainly is a man of strong viewpoints,’ he reported back to Tony, ‘I believe he did listen to us on a number of points, specifically including his use of language. Accordingly, I think we should press on and see how it goes.’

  That approach was not good enough for Tony, who now had the bit between his teeth. ‘I am really not sure if there is an improvement,’ he replied. ‘The fact that I write directly to you probably says it all. Michael does not want to listen.’ Then he added ominously, ‘I must therefore give my own position further thought.’

  Tony wrote to Bonderman again on 1 October 2004. ‘I have given my position further thought and have decided that I will resign with immediate effect. This decision I deeply regret as I am extraordinarily proud of the company and its management. I know it is the correct action for the Board.’ In a gracious touch, Tony added a line of personal thanks. ‘David, you have been a great friend of Ryanair and have steered the company in a most sophisticated manner. My family and I are indebted to you.’

  Bonderman might have been glad to see an end to the fighting between the founder and the chief executive of Ryanair. Yet he fought hard to convince Tony to stay. He immediately phoned Lyons for a long conversation with Tony and at least stalled the decision by asking him not to do anything precipitate. As a gesture of good will, Tony agreed to take a week to think about it. ‘Your phone call last evening is much appreciated,’ he wrote to Bonderman by email.

  A week later Tony went back to Bonderman to say he was resolved to go. O’Leary’s behaviour had become unendurable. ‘As per your request, I have given the question of my resignation considerable thought over the last few days,’ he wrote on 7 October. ‘The Chief Executive’s lack of interest in Directors’ views leaves me no alternative but to resign.’ The email was copied to O’Leary.

  Bonderman tried again to persuade Tony to stay, eventually convincing him on the grounds that his resignation would inevitably be presented as a lack of faith in the company.

  ‘I am now concerned that my resignation may be misconstrued,’ Tony conceded. In fact he would remain on the board until his death, in 2007, but in 2004 he effected his withdrawal in another, more concrete way. Earlier in the year Declan and Shane had disposed of shares worth €44 million, representing 0.8 per cent of the company. In the autumn Tony followed suit, selling half his remaining shareholding in the airline, raising €25 million in the process. That left him holding only 0.75 per cent of Ryanair, following an earlier sale in June 2002 that had raised €20 million. In total, Tony and his three sons had made about €500 million from Ryanair shares. They retained an interest estimated at a further €300 million, but the largest individual shareholder was now Michael O’Leary.

  Tony’s gradual withdrawal from Ryanair had been more profitable and elegant, and less traumatic, than his exit from GPA. Nevertheless it was an extended farewell that brought to an end the second of the two great entrepreneurial projects to which he had dedicated most of his business life.

  This time round he had been left with multi-millions that would allow him to live out his retirement in luxury. He purchased a stake in the famous Bordeaux vineyard Château Lascombes and enjoyed beautiful properties at home and abroad, including Castleton Lyons in Kentucky, a house in Ibiza, a fine apartment in Cadogan Square in London, and, primarily for the purposes of tax residency, another apartment in the luxury La Rocamar building in Monte Carlo. (In December 1997 he was lucky to escape an attack by intruders at his property in London. The incident only served to confirm his habitual dislike of city living.)

  Indeed, in these years, friends often thought that he should have made even more of enjoying his great wealth. Denis O’Brien suggests that Tony was

  full of contradictions. He would pay a thousand euro for dinner, but then he would take a Ryanair flight down to Ibiza instead of using a private jet. I remember talking to J. P. McManus about it, and he said, ‘Don’t even think about what the jet costs, because you’ll be in a box quick enough.’ Tony didn’t have that attitude.

  Whatever Tony’s riches, friends also noticed that his characteristic restlessness seemed undiminished. He remained fascinated by the aviation business and was always on the lookout for new opportunities. He tried to buy Milovice Airport in Prague to establish a low-cost hub in the centre of Europe. The deal eventually faltered when the Czech government refused to give him indemnities over the land. As a former military airport it might, for example, have been contaminated with radioactive material.

  More profitable was an investment made in Singapore. In 2003 the family’s investment vehicle, Irelandia, had taken a 14 per cent holding in Tiger Airways, a new no-frills airline offering low-cost fares to destinations including Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Thailand and Vietnam. Charlie Clifton, who had worked for Ryanair since the early days, when he was taken on as a sixteen-year-old, was put into Tiger Airways to set up the operation and find a chief executive. His new job also allowed him to get in a few jibes on Irelandia’s behalf. Tiger Airways, Clifton informed the press, would certainly attempt to replicate the Ryanair model, but it would be very different in style from the operation run by O’Leary. ‘Michael has a very personal way of doing business that might work down here, or people might be highly insulted by it,’ he observed. ‘If a potential candidate comes in cursing, roaring and shouting, that doesn’t mean that they will get the job.’

  Clifton had also worked on Tony’s failed attempt to get a second airport for Dublin, at Baldonnel, so he was also able to dispense a cuff round the ear on that score too. The Singapore government would be building a new low-cost carrier terminal for €22 million in order to cope with the additional passengers it expected. The Irish Times, after a briefing from Clifton, reported that ‘the Singapore government was surprised at the lack of such facilities in the Republic.’ Soon enough the Irish Times was writing headlines about how ‘Asia listens to roar of Ryan’s Tiger Airways’. When Tiger Airways floated in 2010, Irelandia netted an estimated €40 million from the investment, repeating the trick of Ryanair in 1997.

  Another start-up investment was even closer to Tony’s heart. In 2006 he established a venture called RyanMex, which took a 49 per cent holding in a new Mexican low-cost airline, VivaAerobus. It was one of a long series of investments that Tony had made in Mexico. In the 1980s GPA had facilitated the privatisation of the national carrier, Aeroméxico, and leased aircraft to most of Mexico’s airlines. GPA also had interest in a leisure company with holdings in major tourist hot spots. But Tony’s commitment to the country went beyond business. ‘People had very little idea how many pals he had down there,’ Tony’s friend John Meagher says. ‘He absolutely adored Mexico.’

  Years earlier Tony had bought a beautiful house, nicknamed ‘Casa Paddy’, in Careyes, on the Pacific coast, to which he would frequently bring friends and family on holiday, often for New Year. The billionaire financier Sir James Goldsmith lived next-door. In 1990 Tony’
s interest had even extended to accepting an invitation from the Mexican government to become Honorary Consul in Ireland. This led to one of his more bizarre encounters.

  After a couple of years struggling to learn Spanish, Tony had taken himself off to an immersion school in Mexico to get to grips with the language. He arrived only to be confronted by Eamon Casey, the recently disgraced Bishop of Galway, who was learning Spanish in advance of being sent on a mission to Ecuador. Seán Donlon, who had been the Irish ambassador to Mexico, collected Tony afterwards. ‘I greeted him warmly in the Camino Real Hotel and started to speak to him in Spanish,’ Donlon recalls. ‘And he said, “For feck’s sake, shut up. I’ve been speaking English for two weeks with Eamon Casey!” Neither of them had learnt a word.’

  Donlon was more impressed by Tony’s knowledge and connections in Mexico than by his language skills. When he was secretary-general of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Donlon had worked closely with Tony on the case of the former president of Mexico, Carlos Salinas, who was dogged by allegations of corruption. Donlon recalls that Salinas

  had moved to the United States, but the Americans said we would be doing them a favour if we gave him asylum, because they didn’t want him in the States, or the embarrassment of a messy extradition case. So Tony was involved, and it was all done very gently. It showed that his contacts in Mexico were superb. I had been ambassador to Mexico, but Tony in fact had far more high-level contacts in Mexico than I had.

  In 2004 the Mexican government awarded Tony the Order of the Aztec Eagle—the highest decoration that could be presented to a foreigner—for his outstanding service in strengthening ties between Mexico and Ireland.

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  As well as exploring investment opportunities with start-up businesses, Tony was also prodded to think, reluctantly at first, about his legacy and the future of entrepreneurship in Ireland. Early 21st-century Ireland was still riding the Celtic Tiger hard. Money was being made hand over fist, driven by easy credit and a property bubble. Where previous generations had aspired to be writers and poets, or to have the safety and respectability of employment in public service, a new generation now wanted to be entrepreneurs and property developers. Universities and colleges were happy to cash in on the trend, creating courses that taught young tigers how to make their fortune. Tony, however, had thought that the whole notion was BS until his sons and an old friend changed his mind.

  It was Declan Ryan who had phoned Ed Walsh of the University of Limerick to say, ‘Shane, Cathal and myself want to do something in education to recognise Tony.’ Walsh soon approached Tony and told him he was heading over to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the finest colleges in the world. Would Tony like to join him to have a look? Tony agreed to go, apparently looking forward to mischief-making at an institution he knew would be hoping to extract an endowment. Sure enough, as soon as Tony arrived he started behaving badly. ‘Come on, let’s leave this fecking place,’ he told Walsh after the first dinner. ‘We’ll go to Israel, where they know something about entrepreneurship.’

  Ken Morse, head of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, was having none of it. ‘Ryan, you’re an old-fashioned entrepreneur,’ he told him, playfully grabbing Tony’s lapels. ‘You’re badly educated, and if you were trying to start now, you wouldn’t succeed. Be here for the breakfast meeting at 8 a.m. and you’ll see why.’ It was a risky strategy but one better suited to Tony’s instinctive dislike of sycophancy.

  When Tony turned up next morning, he found himself at a table with a group of twenty-somethings who had come to do an intensive one-week course on venture capitalism. Walsh recalls that they

  all looked as if they had just done their Leaving Cert, so Tony said, ‘What are you lads?’ expecting that he’d pick them off. By the time he got round the table he discovered that all of them had already launched successful companies and had such wealth that they wanted to know what to do with it. So Tony started paying attention. He really liked them, because they were his kind of people.

  What Tony soon discovered was that his new friends were MIT graduates who, whatever their principal subject might have been, had all taken modules in entrepreneurship. By the time Tony was half way through listening to his first lecture, Walsh remembers, ‘he was writing things down!’

  The climax of the day came in a back-and-forth exchange with Morse in front of four hundred MIT students. Tony was entranced by the whole experience. As he came away he turned to Walsh and said, with all the conviction of a convert, ‘I want a Ryan Academy!’

  Tony threw himself into the new venture with characteristic gusto. He persuaded Walsh to act as pioneer. Tony and the family would donate €7 million to establishing the academy in the new digital park at Citywest, under the auspices of Dublin City University. When the DCU Ryan Academy of Entrepreneurship was established, in 2005, Tony committed another €10 million as a seed fund for start-ups developed by students.

  His involvement was more than financial. In particular he took a great interest in the architectural aspects of the scheme. John Meagher was engaged to oversee the project, although that turned out to be a mixed blessing for him. ‘He drove me completely mad over the Ryan Academy,’ Meagher recalls. The 10,000 square foot glass-and-titanium building was very contemporary in design, with plans for an impressive granite entrance. Tony, however, wanted something more traditional, including a classical portico at the front. Meagher refused point blank.

  At a meeting with the DCU advisory board in the Orangery at Lyons, Tony attempted to browbeat his friend into submission. ‘Don’t worry, John will change it,’ he told the university president, Ferdinand von Prondzynski. Meagher refused to give ground, saying, ‘We’ve discussed this—the answer is no.’ When Tony came back at him again, Meagher simply stood up and left the meeting. ‘I was upset with myself for having a go at him in front of all the board, and I was upset because he was winding me up,’ Meagher recalls.

  Tony knew immediately that he had overstepped the mark. As Meagher arrived at the ancient wooden front door of Lyons he felt a hand on his shoulder. ‘I’m sorry, okay?’ Tony said. ‘Just do it the way you want.’ Without waiting for a response, Tony turned and went back to the meeting. It was a rare example of him climbing down in front of others and a testament to the depth of feeling he had for the friendship.

  Although Tony had taken some persuading about the Ryan Academy, it was in many ways an obvious project for him. His next scheme, however, caught everyone off guard. With its long tradition of emigration to the United States, Ireland had been deeply affected by the terrorist attacks in New York in 2001. There was even a national day of mourning held, with schools, offices and shops closing throughout the country. Tony was horrified by images of the planes he loved so much being used to wreak death and destruction. Though he had travelled throughout the world, he realised he knew little about Islam. Always an avid reader, he began to immerse himself in its history and culture. His friends and family were used to these spurts of interest in whatever captured his imagination at any given moment. Sometimes, as with his passion for architecture and the decorative arts, they went somewhere. At other times, such as when he bought the house from the film Ryan’s Daughter, they were nothing more than whims.

  But on this occasion Tony surpassed himself in audacity. In the middle of 2005, with controversy still raging over the war in Iraq, he phoned his friend Seán Donlon with a bold suggestion: he wanted to create a foundation to help build bridges between Islam and Christianity. Astonishingly he was willing to donate Lyons Demesne, then worth more than €100 million, to house the foundation. And he wanted the former US president Bill Clinton and the sitting British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, to head it.

  Donlon reflects that it was

  in some ways the most unexpected project, because it had no commercial interest. But Tony was always a big thinker. He never thought in terms of little things—he always had grand ideas. He was probably the most international of Irish people that
I ever worked with, including those like Garret FitzGerald, Tony O’Reilly and Michael Smurfit, all of whom were very internationally focused. But Tony was not only internationally focused: he saw a big picture always. Now, towards the end of his life, he wanted to leave some sort of contribution to peace.

  Just as Walsh had been the right choice to steer through the Ryan Academy, Donlon was the best man to spearhead the faith foundation. Once he had got over his surprise at this ‘most improbable turn’, Donlon turned his mind and his years of experience to the task in hand.

  His first act was to express scepticism about whether Blair, who had taken Britain to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, was the right person to involve in a foundation designed to reconcile Muslims and Christians. However, Tony, who greatly admired Blair for his work on Northern Ireland, insisted on his choice.

  When Donlon put out feelers in London, he received encouragement. ‘It was clear to me that the Blair people were definitely interested,’ he says, ‘because they saw not only the possibility of getting a fine headquarters for the foundation, but I think they also saw the possibility of getting big money from Tony Ryan.’

  A meeting was put together involving Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff, and Tim Phillips, special adviser to Clinton. Donlon also tapped up Irish diplomatic luminaries such as Noel Dorr, who had once chaired the UN Security Council. With Blair set to retire as Prime Minister in 2007, everything looked set for the establishment of a faith foundation at Lyons.

  Fatefully, it was not to be. In October 2006, shortly after Blair announced that he would soon be stepping down, Tony Ryan received a devastating medical diagnosis: he had pancreatic cancer. In many ways the shock of the news was compounded by the nature of the disease itself. His own father, Martin, had died in his mid-fifties of a heart attack, and Tony fully expected that his genetic inheritance would see him go the same way. He had intermittently worried about this fact, taking steps to lighten the load or to consider retirement. There were periodic efforts at weight loss and at giving up the cigars he habitually smoked after dinner. And he walked and walked, sometimes going out five times a day, much to the amusement of his grandchildren, who would take turns to accompany him during the school holidays. The urge to take on new challenges had always pushed Tony back into the front line, but the thought that one day he might simply drop down dead of a heart attack was often with him. These thoughts had been exacerbated at the turn of the century by open-heart surgery, which, he joked to friends, made him a member of the ‘zipper club’.