by Alan Ruddock
Michael O’Leary
A Life in Full Flight
Alan Ruddock, a contemporary of Michael O’Leary’s at Trinity College, Dublin, is a former business journalist with the Sunday Times and former editor of the Scotsman. He is currently a commentator with the Sunday Independent, Ireland’s largest-selling newspaper.
Michael O’Leary
A Life in Full Flight
ALAN RUDDOCK
PENGUIN
IRELAND
PENGUIN IRELAND
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland
(a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
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First published 2007
1
Copyright © Alan Ruddock, 2007
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved
Without limiting the rights under copyright
reserved above, no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
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EISBN :978–0–141–90249–4
There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order.
– Niccolò Machiavelli
Business books are bullshit and are usually written by wankers.
– Michael O’Leary
Contents
1. The Black Hole
2. Rites of Passage
3. Ryan’s Dream
4. Dash for Growth
5. Pearly Gates
6. Cohabitation
7. The Last Handout
8. Bread and Water
9. Takeover Talk
10. Stepping up, and down
11. Out-of-Town Airports
12. A New Beginning
13. Pre-emptive Strike
14. Opening New Fronts
15. Dot-Com Revolution
16. Vulgar Abuse
17. Customer Care
18. Terror in the Skies
19. Taking on the EU
20. Home Fires Burning
21. Poor Little Rich Boy
22. Baying for Blood
23. Town Hall Showman
24. The Last Socialist
25. Full Frontal Assault
26. Mischief and Mayhem
Acknowledgements
Index
1. The Black Hole
Michael Gerard Joseph Mary O’Leary was named after a grandfather, a grandmother, his own mother and the Virgin Mary. The names reflected the family’s traditions – rural, Roman Catholic, conservative – and Michael O’Leary’s early life was steeped in the values of home and family.
Born on 20 March 1961 in a maternity hospital in Dublin’s Hatch Street, on the site of what became the office of the Euro Changeover Board, the second child and first son of Timothy (‘Ted’) and Gerarda O’Leary would be one of six children – three girls and three boys. For the first ten years of his life the family lived in a comfortable red-brick house in the centre of Mullingar, before moving to the greater freedom of Lynn, on the outskirts of the town, where his parents still live. No matter where they were, however, the rules were the same.
‘Each of the girls got their own rooms and the three boys were always in a black hole of Calcutta,’ Michael O’Leary has recalled. ‘We didn’t understand at the time. Apparently boys didn’t need their privacy at all so we roomed together in the slum. The girls all had their rooms and they were all decorated in flowery wallpapers and posters of pop stars. We were always left in one room together to fight it out amongst ourselves.’
Both his parents hailed originally from Kanturk, a small town in County Cork, where his mother’s parents were prosperous farmers. Timothy and Gerarda met and courted in their hometown, and were married in nearby Adare, County Limerick, in October 1958. Immediately afterwards they struck out on their own for a new life in the midlands, moving to Ballinderry, in County Westmeath, where Timothy’s parents had helped launch Tailteann, a textile business, in the 1940s. Their new dream was not a farm, but business: Timothy was taking responsibility for his parents’ textile business. Along with two local dentists and their wives, Timothy was now a major shareholder in the knitwear company located in Mullingar, Westmeath’s county town, which lies about fifty miles west of Dublin.
Tailteann Textiles was a challenging venture. Ireland in the late 1950s was an economic backwater, a country that relied heavily on agriculture and that had failed, in its first thirty-five years of independence, to develop an industrial base. For Mullingar, a market town with a population around 5,000, the Tailteann factory had been an important development. It offered jobs – at its peak the factory employed more than 120 locals – and a sense of progress to a community that had lacked both.
Timothy O’Leary, bursting with ideas, was determined to run a thriving business and to provide a stable home for his new wife and their children. The first child, Ashley Concepta, had been born a year after the wedding, to be followed by Michael two years later. By the time their third child, Eddie, was born in 1962, Timothy had become more than just a shareholder, taking over as factory manager that year. A keen golfer, he had quickly become a well known and much liked figure in the local golf club, which at the time was considered one of the finest courses in the country.
‘At the time there were very few wealthy men around,’ said Albert Reynolds, an old family friend who went on to become the Irish prime minister. ‘Like the rest of us, he was working. But he was always very well dressed and had a good car and all of the family were always well turned out.’
Gerarda O’Leary was typical of her generation – devoted to her family, deeply religious and fiercely protective of her children, particularly her sons. Donie Cassidy, who was a friend of Timothy and Gerarda and is now a member of the Dáil representing the people of Westmeath, remembers Gerarda as ‘very religious’ and heavily involved in the local prayer group. ‘She wouldn’t suffer fools lightly, and she certainly would be in no way accepting of anything except the highest standards.’ Cassidy believes Gerarda was the ‘dominant figure’ behind her husband’s successes: ‘She was the driving force; she was one of the most determined people I ever met,’ he said.
Michael O’Leary recalls, ‘She was the stay-at-home mother, six kids, no help. Looking back I don’t know how anybody did it, except they all did it in those days. But then she was very good. She’d do the garden, she was big into gardening and decorating houses, she was good at it. A
nd with six kids they were frequently decorating houses. We’d trash the place,’ he says.
Her influence remains a potent one. One former colleague remembers that Michael ‘only put on a suit when she was coming to Dublin’.
In September 1965, aged four and a half, Michael O’Leary started school in St Mary’s, a local national school for boys and girls. After three years he moved to the all-boy environment of the Christian Brothers school in Mullingar.
The Christian Brothers at that time often made heavy use of corporal punishment, but O’Leary does not recall a particularly violent schooling. ‘I was only seven years old but I don’t think of myself as an abused or a battered soul,’ he says, ‘but if I did get a belt I certainly got my spelling right the next day.’
Classmates recall O’Leary as someone who was able to defend himself. ‘You always got the impression he was well able to stand up for himself; he would never let himself be put down,’ said one. ‘He wasn’t the type to get into fights but he wouldn’t let himself be put down.’
There were more than 400 boys in the school and class sizes were large. ‘There were between forty and forty-five boys in any one class,’ says Fergal Oakes, one of O’Leary’s early teachers and now principal of the school. A classmate claims there were more than sixty boys crammed into one of their years.
O’Leary’s contemporaries don’t recall him as being particularly bright. ‘He never stood out as being top of the class or anything,’ said one. ‘He would have been somewhere in the middle, an average pupil.’ But O’Leary puts a slightly different slant on it: ‘I was pretty good at school,’ he says, ‘but without having to try that hard.’ What did mark him out was his dress. ‘I remember he used to always stand out because he’d have a short-trouser suit and an Aran sweater that we didn’t have,’ recalls one former classmate. ‘All the rest of us would be there in hand-me-downs from our brothers and sisters.’
Always a small child, O’Leary nevertheless enjoyed sports. The school’s focus was on traditional Irish games – Gaelic football and hurling – and O’Leary participated in ‘anything that was going’. But he steered clear of the Scouts – ‘They wouldn’t have let me in’ – as well as arts and riding. ‘I’m not into art, never have been. I’ve nothing on my left side [of the brain], or whatever side of the brain artistic stuff is on,’ he says. ‘And the only thing I didn’t do, which the other brothers and sisters did, was the pony club. I could never twig riding horses. I couldn’t ride one now. I could ride when I was younger but it just didn’t do anything for me. So most of the other brothers and sisters were mad about riding horses. When they were doing things like the pony club I was playing soccer or golf or whatever.’
Summers were mainly spent at home in Mullingar. ‘I certainly wasn’t on a plane when I was a kid,’ says O’Leary. ‘We didn’t go on holidays much because farmers tended not to go on that many holidays’ – despite his father’s business ventures, O’Leary still sees himself as a product of farming stock – ‘and also with six kids I don’t think the parents wanted to bring us on holidays. I remember some years we went away – we went down to the sea somewhere in Kerry at one stage and we went to Rosslare another year. But we certainly didn’t go every year.’
O’Leary’s memories of his childhood are, at best, sketchy. He has told interviewers that his early years were marked by the upheaval of moving home several times, usually after one of his father’s business ventures had failed. ‘[My father] used to set up businesses that would be very successful for the first few years and then go bust,’ O’Leary told Eamon Dunphy during an extensive TV interview. ‘When he went bust, he would sell the house, and when he made money he would buy another house.’
Reynolds’s recollections are similar. ‘Ted would get an idea in his head, give it a good run, and if it didn’t work turn to something else,’ he says. ‘He wouldn’t be done down by failure at all.’
‘He was always active,’ O’Leary told radio interviewer Shane Kenny. ‘The trouble, like with a lot of entrepreneurs, was that once he had set up a business he started to lose interest in it, or lose money, which was even worse.’
While growing up O’Leary moved house three times. Until 1972 the family lived in Mullingar’s Harbour Street, the smallest of the homes he would occupy. The family then moved briefly to Clonard House, a large house on the outskirts of the town, the former residence of the Bishop of Meath and now home to the local tourist board. The following year they moved again, this time to Lynn, just outside Mullingar, where they stayed for the rest of his childhood. The moves were precipitated by the growing size of the O’Leary family, which by 1973 had reached its full complement of eight.
In other interviews O’Leary has praised his father as being a ‘genius at setting up business’ and has credited his parents with instilling his work ethic. ‘I learned from my parents the value of hard work and I think that will always stay with me,’ he told an interviewer in 1999.
Tailteann did eventually run into trouble, but not before enjoying a sustained period of success and expansion. In the early 1960s the business had received small government grants and had borrowed to expand, taking out a £20,000 loan in 1964 and a further £15,000 two years later. As the business grew, so the shareholders and directors changed, with more Dublin-based businessmen coming on board to replace the original investors. In 1970 the local paper ran a story commenting on the role Tailteann Textiles had played in putting Mullingar on the industrial map. Reflecting a more innocent age, every year a ‘Miss Tailteann’ was crowned at the staff Christmas party.
The company, originally based at Columb Barracks, in Mullingar, with 30 employees, relocated that year to a new factory on the Longford Road just outside the town, and the staff numbers grew to 120. The next year Timothy’s mother, an original shareholder, handed her stake over to her son, making him the largest single shareholder and allowing him to become chairman of the company.
Over the next five years, however, Tailteann suffered as recession struck and oil prices soared. In November 1976, with its debts out of control, the Bank of Ireland appointed a receiver and the following year the company was sold for a nominal amount to a Dutch multinational.
2. Rites of Passage
The journey from Mullingar to Clongowes Wood College in Clane, County Kildare, takes just over an hour and a half, but when the thirteen-year-old Michael O’Leary set off for his new boarding school on a bright September day in 1974, he was entering a different world. In the 1970s, well before the economic boom that would create a new class of Irish wealthy, Clongowes was the school of choice for Ireland’s well-to-do rural professionals and farmers, its dormitories filled with the sons of doctors, dentists, accountants and landowners, most of whom hailed from the nearby counties.
‘The funny thing about Clongowes [is that] it is now a school for the rich and famous – multimillionaires’ sons go to Clongowes,’ says O’Leary. ‘When we were there nobody was there. The year I left and my brother was still there [Sir Anthony] O’Reilly put two kids in for fifth and sixth forms and suddenly there was someone famous there. And Anto comes in the helicopter and lands on the under-thirteen pitch. It wasn’t that kind of a [posh] place. There was no rich list in the 1970s. If you stood out for anything in Clongowes, except for rugby, you learned fairly quickly to stop standing out.’
Despite the perils of standing out at Clongowes, the school has many famous past pupils, including James Joyce; John Bruton, a farmer’s son who would become prime minister of Ireland and the EU’s ambassador to the United States; Paul McGuinness, an O’Leary contemporary and the son of a soldier who became manager of U2, Ireland’s most successful rock band; and David Dilger, the chief executive of Greencore, one of Ireland’s largest food companies.
Founded in 1814, Clongowes was the first Jesuit college for boys in Ireland, and its mission was to inculcate the Jesuit tradition in the thousands of boys who would enter its gates in the years to come. The pupils, privileged because of their
families’ relative wealth, would nonetheless be taught about their responsibilities to their communities and to God. Sport, particularly rugby and tennis, was an essential part of the formula.
O’Leary’s first sight of Clongowes’ impressive nineteenth-century buildings and grounds had come the previous year in 1973 when, as a gauche twelve-year-old who knew little of life outside Mullingar, he was brought to visit the school by his parents. ‘I’ll never forget the first time the parents took me around Clongowes. It had football pitches, soccer pitches, it had a swimming pool and tennis courts and I thought this was heaven. I had never seen a place that had so many sports facilities. I was delighted to go there. I didn’t miss home in the least.’
In that, O’Leary was fortunate. Boarders rarely left the school during the term, with visits restricted to a few Sundays in the year and one weekend break at home for half-term. O’Leary settled in quickly, making friends who would stay with him for the rest of his life and participating enthusiastically, if rarely successfully, in as much sport as he could manage.
‘Basketball and cricket were the only ones I didn’t play,’ he says. ‘I hated cricket, couldn’t understand bloody basketball but then I was about four foot nothing so for basketball I was kind of physically challenged. I was more likely to have been the ball. But I tried hard. So I finished up on most of the teams except for the rugby. I was tiny on the rugby pitch so I finished up on the super thirds for rugby, which was for the plodders.’
Academically O’Leary was an average student, never pushing himself too hard, but never struggling to make his grades. ‘If you were in the top ten per cent you were a swot; if you were in the bottom ten per cent you were a moron, and much better off to be in the middle…In a fucked-up way, I was nobody in school,’ O’Leary says. ‘I was common Joe Soap. I’m still common Joe Soap, I just got lucky a couple of times.’
His one area of success, school friends claim, was in cross country running. ‘He was small, but he was gritty,’ says one contemporary, ‘and he could just keep running.’