Michael O'Leary by Alan Ruddock

Author:Alan Ruddock [Ruddock, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2007-01-23T23:00:00+00:00

For several weeks now skywatchers have been reporting that Ryanair’s new plane is indeed flying in and out of Dublin. This week, Ryanair confirmed this was the case, but described the journeys as ‘proving flights’ – the test-runs used by new pilots. The flights are, however, carrying fare-paying passengers on board. Ryanair now says this plane will not be used in Dublin for long, and that when the summer schedule starts, it will be moved to Stansted for routes to the Continent only.

Foreign airlines might have been easy prey for O’Leary, but at home the media had grown wise to his stunts.

Less than two years after Ryanair launched its route between Stansted and Kerry, with the route a success and tourism numbers on the rise, Kerry airport was looking to expand. The expansion would need funding, and the airport’s management decided the best way to secure that funding was a £5 ‘development levy’ to be paid by all departing passengers from 1 May.

In April O’Leary took to the newspapers and airwaves, denouncing the charge – which would add 6.25 per cent to its lowest fares of about £80 on the route – as ‘unworkable’ and urging passengers to refuse to pay it. A former Kerry executive says the airport was surprised by Ryanair’s reaction. ‘On the [first] anniversary of our first flight [June 1997] we said to Ryanair, “Listen, we’re going to bring in this thing,“’ he says. ‘They said, “Grand.” They didn’t seem too perturbed. And then they just decided against it, I think on the basis that if this was successfully introduced in Kerry this would happen everywhere and it would be a bad precedent for Ryanair to accept it.’

He was right. What was the point, O’Leary thought, of winning lower airport charges if a small-time operator like Kerry could then turn around and introduce new levies on his passengers? If he allowed Kerry to charge his passengers five pounds, how could he prevent them charging ten? Or object if Treviso or Charleroi introduced similar charges? Kerry had negotiated low landing charges with Ryanair in good faith, and Ryanair had delivered the passengers. The airport’s opportunity was to make money from those passengers by selling them goods and services, not by slapping on levies.

The Irish media, however, was instinctively sympathetic to Kerry and growing tired of O’Leary’s relentless hostility, with the Irish Independent reporting, ‘Ryanair, the discount airline, has declared war on yet another Irish airport.’ O’Leary did not care about the media’s attitude and rolled out another pamphlet campaign, distributing 20,000 ‘No to Kerry levy’ leaflets on Kerry-Stansted flights. ‘They handed them out for about a week,’ says Bellew. ‘We just thought, fair enough, if that’s what they want to do. We weren’t happy about it, I suppose, but it was just a bit of a nuisance.’

The leaflet’s impact was limited to the felling of a few trees, and the levy stayed, for the moment.

A year on from the IPO, Ryanair was still perceived as a family firm.

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