Cancer was not something Tony had expected. Neither did it promise the kind of death that suited his temperament. Active until the end and felled by a heart attack, like his father—that was the kind of ending (as much as any) that Tony had half-wanted and expected. Yet over the next year, as it became clear that there would be no remission, friends and family were struck by how positive and upbeat he remained in fighting to the very end.
Tony’s courage was on display from the outset. He received his diagnosis on Friday 13 October 2006. The next morning he went ahead with an interview already scheduled with Marian Finucane on RTE Radio 1. ‘It was an incredibly brave interview, because he had just been given a death sentence,’ remembers Tony’s friend Gerry Power. ‘The day after that interview he flew to the United States and started treatment immediately.’
Over the next twelve months Tony would endure painful treatments at the Markey Cancer Center in Kentucky and at the Blackrock Clinic and St Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin. Despite the severe physical discomfort, friends noticed a new mellowness in Tony that replaced his characteristic restlessness. He was very happy in his personal life with Martine Head, who lived with him at Lyons and tended to him with great tenderness through his last illness. He also took great pleasure during these last months from the Village at Lyons, which he had developed beside the Grand Canal. Work was continuing in restoring the ruined mill village, with new restaurants already opened.
Tony now enjoyed nothing more each day than pottering down to the village, helped by the steadfast Derek Doyle. He would talk to craftspeople about decorative ceilings and wall plasterwork, painting and detailing, french polishing, and every aspect of colours, materials and tones. Auction catalogues would be scoured for just the right artefacts. Designers and architects would be summoned.
‘We’d go trundling around,’ John Meagher says, ‘and he’d be saying, I’m going to do this here and going to do that there. He was still going over everything a hundred times.’ Particular care was taken with the chapel, which, Meagher was astonished to find, was being shored up with vast quantities of reinforced concrete. ‘You know that’s enough to hold up the QE2,’ Meagher told him. Tony blandly replied that it was needed because of all the water nearby. It was only later that Meagher realised that Tony had been making preparations for his final resting place.
By the autumn of 2007, as it became obvious that the end was near, friends and family were called in for what Tony called the ‘exit interview’. That humour was characteristic of his mood during those last days. At the last gathering of all the family together, as they departed from Lyons, Tony appeared on the balcony of his bedroom to bestow a papal-like blessing on the crowd below, before dissolving into helpless laughter.
When Jack Ryan, Declan’s eleven-year-old son, came in to see his grandfather for the last time, he was offered words of comfort. ‘You know I’m going to a better place,’ Tony told him.
Jack walked to the window and looked out over the grounds, puzzlement on his face. ‘Really?’ he said, as his grandfather roared with laughter. ‘A better place than Lyons?’
——
Tony Ryan died at home on Wednesday 3 October 2007 at three o’clock in the afternoon. He was seventy-one. In the days that followed, tributes poured in from Ireland and around the world. The Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, described Tony’s contribution as ‘immense’, and he hailed ‘one of the greatest Irish economic success stories.’ Michael O’Leary said his former boss was one of the twentieth century’s ‘greatest Irishmen’. The Ryanair chairman, David Bonderman, praised his ‘extraordinary vision’. Tony O’Reilly spoke of how Tony had ‘changed the skies of Europe, not just for Irish people, but for all Europeans.’ The former Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald noted that ‘it was Tony Ryan who showed us how to transcend Ireland’s geographical isolation.’
Newspapers around the world reported Tony’s death, with widespread coverage particularly in the United States and Britain. American newspapers focused on the story of how the ‘son of a train driver’ became one of ‘Ireland’s richest people’. In Britain the emphasis was on the importance of Ryanair. ‘Founder of Ryanair whose independent and forceful approach transformed European air travel,’ summed up the Times obituary. The Daily Mail—house newspaper of the English middle classes—put it more pithily: Tony Ryan was the ‘maverick who gave us the world’.
In the weeks and months that followed, vast coverage continued in Ireland about every aspect of Tony’s life and legacy. Friends and former colleagues filled the opinion pages with vivid recollections. Colour sections and diary pages told stories of passion and great luxury. Business pages drew lessons from his entrepreneurial ups and downs. Politicians and pundits told us what his story meant for Ireland in a globalised world. Yet behind all the stories and pages of analysis there ran a lingering bafflement about how the hell Tony had done it all.
Many years earlier Michael Dargan, former chief executive of Aer Lingus and a Tipperary man, had neatly expressed that sense of bewilderment. ‘The magnitude of Tony Ryan’s success is baffling. The historian may record it, but he can hardly explain it.’
On one level the task of explaining Tony Ryan might seem deceptively straightforward. After all, his life appeared to conform to one of the most attractive narratives in human existence: the working-class boy made good. Tony came from a happy home, but his family didn’t have much in the way of money or entrepreneurial ambition. When he got a job in Aer Lingus shortly before his father died, his parents were delighted, because a public-service job in the Ireland of the 1950s brought both security and respectability. For a long time Tony seemed happy with those qualities in his life, until a slow epiphany drew him towards the entrepreneurial life and unimagined riches. The story didn’t have to turn out that way—the example of his friend and namesake Christy Ryan, who started out in Aer Lingus at the same time and pursued his own entrepreneurial dreams, without much success, was stark proof that it was Tony who made his own life and that it could have turned out entirely other than it did.
By any standard the rise to riches of this train driver’s son was an astonishing story. Nevertheless, as Malcolm Gladwell points out in his influential book Outliers, even the most brilliant of self-made men come from somewhere. ‘People don’t rise from nothing,’ he writes. ‘It makes a difference where and when we grew up.’
That was certainly the case for Tony. It was no coincidence that the transformational figures in the business life of modern Ireland—Tony Ryan, Michael Smurfit and Tony O’Reilly—were all born in the same year, 1936. Ireland might then have seemed the bleakest ground in which to plant entrepreneurial seeds; but in fact the timing was perfect. By the time they were starting out, Ireland was emerging from an era of self-imposed, crippling economic isolation. In the 1950s the forward thinking of politicians like Seán Lemass and public servants such as Ken Whitaker and Todd Andrews began to transform a relatively barren landscape into one cultivated for competition and entrepreneurial activity.
Membership of the European Community from 1973 further extended the drive towards competition and opened up a vast marketplace. Because the free market was a new frontier in Ireland, it presented opportunities for ‘change agents’, without as many of the rules and constraints that would later develop, and no preceding generation that had already made off with all the best new ideas. Like a young second lieutenant in a war who suddenly finds that all the officers above him have been killed, Tony and his generation unexpectedly found themselves in charge. That was the environment that enabled Smurfit to grow his small business into the world’s largest paper-packaging company, and O’Reilly to create a media empire while transforming the global fortunes of the famous but languishing Heinz. Tony was the third great member of that business generation, creating a brand-new industry in airline leasing and initiating a revolution in European air travel. It was quite some legacy for the class of ’36.
Timing was also a specific factor for Tony in the arena where he cho
se to fight his battles. In the 1950s and 60s he had pottered along in the airline industry, just like everyone else in Aer Lingus. When he was asked in the early 70s to get rid of two Jumbo Jets that Aer Lingus had sitting idly on the runway in Dublin, it sparked an idea inside him that perfectly exploited the revolution waiting to happen.
Deregulation of the skies, first in the United States and then in the European Union, transformed the airline industry. Tony was an ‘outlier’ in that process, first by inventing, alongside his rival Steve Udvar-Házy, the new industry of aircraft leasing and then by forcing competition on the routes across the Irish Sea, and then Europe, with Ryanair. In both these endeavours Tony showed vision, bravery and tenacity, but neither idea could have succeeded a generation earlier.
So too, Tony’s background, modest though it was, contributed in a profound way to his brilliance and his success. At the most obvious level it is easy to see how the thrill of fast travel was in his blood. There was a glamour to rail travel in the 1930s; his father’s job was one to be admired. What boy would not thrill at the excitement of standing on the footplate of the engine, with the fire blazing and the countryside rushing past in a blur of speed? Trains offered drama and escape in Tony’s otherwise drab life. Aeroplanes simply transformed that experience into one on a global scale.
Tony also learnt about ambition and sacrifice from his father. The family had enjoyed a comfortable life in Limerick Junction, but Martin, in his ambition to be an engine driver, was prepared to uproot his family to miserable accommodation in Thurles. It was the kind of single-mindedness that Tony would apply in his own career, often to the detriment of family life.
Location too was an important factor in Tony’s success. Co. Tipperary from the 1930s onwards may not have been an obvious place for ideas of global entrepreneurship to be germinated. But that is to underestimate the impact of Shannon Airport, Co. Clare on the young Tony Ryan. Not only did it offer the chance of a decent job during times of profound economic hardship but it also had an intense effect on his imagination. If riding on trains with his father told him that all of Ireland was his to discover, Shannon said, ‘Go see the world.’ The transatlantic flights that came in and out of Shannon after 1945 promised a different world from that of ‘cosy homesteads’ and the ‘romping of sturdy children’. The very existence of Shannon Airport seemed to imply that there could be another Ireland to dream of.
What did make Tony exceptional was that he turned the dreams he shared with his generation into reality. That came about not because he wanted to make a fortune— although he was happy when he did—but because he had the vision to see where the market was imperfect, the courage to stake his claim, and the tenacity to see the job through. In that regard Tony was the epitome of what it meant to be an entrepreneur.
Research by the global financial services firm Ernst and Young has identified three behavioural characteristics that successful entrepreneurs seem to share: an opportunistic mindset, acceptance of risk and potential failure, and independence and control. These are all attributes that Tony displayed in abundance.
Both GPA and Ryanair were the result of an opportunistic mindset. Someone was always going to create an airline-leasing business; deregulation was always going to lead to competition in the skies. Tony didn’t just happen to get there first: he barged his way to the front to stake his claim. Once there, he didn’t allow anyone or anything to get in his way until the business succeeded.
Once Tony discovered his entrepreneurial streak, in his thirties, the acceptance of risk and failure became second nature. Critics would point to his accepting too much risk, most notoriously in GPA. Yet it is the failure of GPA as much as its earlier success, together with the later triumph of Ryanair, that marks Tony out as a true entrepreneur. He only knew how to play for high risk. Sometimes he came up ‘snake eyes’, with disastrous consequences for himself and others. Yet the alternative was safety and caution—a job at Cork Airport instead of at JFK, sticking with Aer Lingus instead of striking out with GPA, closing Ryanair when it was losing millions. That would have made Tony a good manager, not an entrepreneur. Unpredictability and even foolhardiness have always been the prerogatives of the creative genius—‘Tony getting all mercurial,’ as Michael O’Leary says.
The third characteristic, the determination to control your own life, is in many ways the strangest conundrum. For all his childhood and the early part of his adulthood, Tony was utterly conventional, even passive. There were no stand-out moments of brilliant individuality or commercial activity. Even more unusually, he was not rebellious by nature as a child. Tony was a friendly lad of middling ability who didn’t make much impact on the world around him. He married the pretty girl around the corner, got a decent job at Aer Lingus and looked set for an utterly conventional life. In many ways it was Aer Lingus that gave him his real schooling, and eventually it became the establishment against which he rebelled. Tony’s entire career from the early 1970s onwards can be seen as an act of rebellion against his parent company. The fact that by the time of Tony’s death Ryanair had supplanted Aer Lingus as Ireland’s biggest airline seemed to him an inevitable and proper outcome of the process.
Over more than thirty years Tony had scaled the heights and plumbed the depths of the entrepreneurial life. He had built up two businesses that transformed international aviation. Even the one that eventually failed created a new leasing industry that superseded GPA itself in importance. The company’s legacy is that Ireland remains the centre for half the world’s aircraft-leasing and aircraft-financing business. As to Ryanair, few would doubt that it transformed the lives of millions of ordinary people. For the first time, air travel became the right of the many instead of the privilege of the few. As the Sun, Britain’s best-selling newspaper, put it the day after Tony’s death:
Little did we know way back in the 1980s that we would soon be flying abroad for next to nothing. Tony Ryan helped ensure this by setting up Ryanair in 1985 and driving down air fares. He died yesterday but his spirit lives on in the sky.
A NOTE ON SOURCES
This book was written primarily from the papers of Tony Ryan held at Lyons Demesne in Co. Kildare. The papers were well maintained during Tony’s lifetime, using for the most part a system of subject and name files. There was also a separate system that recorded daily telephone calls, including personal messages. Because the papers are privately held I have not included references in the text, as these would serve no useful purpose for historians or general readers.
In addition to consulting the archives, a number of Tony’s family, friends and former colleagues generously made themselves available for interview. These included Declan Ryan, the late Simon Ryan, Kell Ryan, Cillian Ryan, Conor Ryan, Ed Walsh, John Meagher, Des O’Malley, Ann Reihill, Margaret Downes, Ken Rohan, Olive Braiden, James Meyler, Derek Doyle, Arthur Finan, Phyllis Finan, Gerry Power, Tom Ryan, David Kennedy, Neil Gleeson, Robert Greenspon, Niall Weldon, Bronwyn Conroy, Mick O’Carroll, Peter Ledbetter, Jim King, Seán Braiden, Margaret Clandillon, Mairead Mason, Seán Donlon, Graham Boyd, Joe Clarkin, Derek O’Brien, Fergus Armstrong, Laurence Crowley, Gerry McEvoy, Pat O’Brien, Mark Hely Hutchinson, David Bonderman, Denis O’Brien and Michael O’Leary. A number of other interviewees spoke off the record.
Tony appeared frequently in the news, so contemporary newspapers have been an invaluable resource, particularly the Irish Times and the Irish Independent.
In addition, the following books and articles have been especially useful: Chapter 1: Michael Hallinan (ed.), Tipperary County: People and Places (1993); William J. Hayes, Thurles: A Guide to the Cathedral Town (1999); Albert Maher, Signalman’s Memories: Railway Life in Rural Ireland (1998). Chapter 2: On the development of Shannon and the transatlantic route: Mike Cronin, Doesn’t Time Fly?: Aer Lingus: Its History (2011). On the early days in the airport and the life of a traffic assistant: Valerie Sweeney, Shannon Airport: A Unique Story of Survival (2004). Chapter 3: On the state of the airline industry in the 1970
s: Bernard Share, Flight of the Iolar: Aer Lingus Experience, 1936–86 (1986); Bartholomew Elias, Airport and Aviation Security: US Policy and Strategy in the Age of Global Terrorism (2009); Mark T. Berger, The Battle for Asia: From Decolonization to Globalization (2004). Competing claims on the GPA start-up are covered in Siobhán Creaton’s excellent history Ryanair (2007 edition). Chapter 4: Tony Ryan commissioned a short history of GPA in the mid-1980s, and I am grateful to its author for permission to consult that unpublished text. Chapter 5: On Kilboy: Mike Bunn, Four Farms. On Irelandia: Alan Ruddock, Michael O’Leary: A Life in Full Flight (2008 edition). On the deregulation of the airline industry: T. A. Heppenheimer, Turbulent Skies: The History of Commercial Aviation (1995); Sean Barrett, Deregulation and the Airline Business in Europe: Selected Readings (2009); Stephen Breyer, ‘Airline deregulation revisited’, Business Week, 20 January 2011. Chapter 6: On the Sunday Tribune: John Horgan, Irish Media: A Critical History since 1922; David Kenny and Nóirín Hegarty (eds.), The Trib: Highlights from the ‘Sunday Tribune’ (2011). On the aircraft-leasing industry: Edward Cahill’s indispensable Corporate Financial Crisis in Ireland (1997). Chapter 7: On the Air Transport Bill (1984), and the deregulation of the Irish airline industry more generally, I follow Barrett, Deregulation and the Airline Business in Europe. Barrett’s fine book has the advantage of being written not only by a leading analyst of the airline industry but also by one of the foremost advocates of deregulation at the time. On Ryanair: Ruddock, Michael O’Leary; Creaton, Ryanair. Chapter 8: On Tony Ryan’s personal life: Emily Hourican, ‘Beauty and bounty at Renaissance prince Tony Ryan’s court’, Sunday Independent, 10 July 2011; Lucinda O’Sullivan, ‘We’ll greatly miss grace and beauty of Miranda’, Sunday Independent, 2 January 2011. On Japanese negotiations: ‘A History of GPA’. On ILFC: Cahill, Corporate Financial Crisis in Ireland. Chapter 10: Financial figures for GPA in 1992 are drawn from Cahill, Corporate Financial Crisis in Ireland. Chapter 11: The collapse of the IPO is subjected to characteristically forensic analysis by Cahill in Corporate Financial Crisis in Ireland; ‘Crash landing’, Sunday Times, 21 June 1992; Christopher Brown, Crash Landing: An Inside Account of the Fall of GPA (2009). Chapter 12: On the two-airline policy: Frank Lahiffe, Séamus Brennan: A Life in Government; Creaton, Ryanair; Ruddock, Michael O’Leary. On Southwest Airlines: Matthew Brelis, ‘Herb’s way’, Boston Globe, 5 November 2000. Chapter 13: On the history and restoration of the Lyons estate: Lyons Demesne: A Georgian Treasure Restored to the Nation; ‘Lyons Demesne: Works from the collection of the late Dr Tony Ryan’ (Christie’s, 14 July 2011); Bunn, Four Farms; ‘Kentucky blue blood’, Architectural Digest, June 2006. Chapter 14: Creaton, Ryanair; Ruddock, Michael O’Leary. Chapter 15: Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success (2008); Anthony J. Mayo et al., Entrepreneurs, Managers and Leaders: What the Airline Industry Can Teach Us about Leadership (2009); John Byrne, World Changers: 25 Entrepreneurs Who Changed Business as We Knew It (2012); Cahill, Corporate Financial Crisis in Ireland; ‘Entrepreneurs’, Economist, 14 January 2012.
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