The township of 12 people
which sells four million
cans of beer a year
Scotland
in the
heat
John Cameron
Why can’t I just
be nice about
Michael O’Leary?
Quintin Jardine
A couple of years ago, after boarding a Ryanair flight at Prestwick Airport, ‘Pure Dead Brilliant’, I discovered that I had left something in the departure lounge. The flight crew were very helpful and recovered it for me before take-off. I was so pleased that in a rash moment I promised the flight director that never again would I say anything rude about Michael O’Leary, its flamboyant chief executive.
Sadly, I have found it very difficult to maintain that pledge.
My problem began with Ryanair’s outrageous behaviour in economically imperilled Spain, where it went head to head with the AENA, the state-owned airport management company, and with the Catalan government, looking to obtain ever higher public subsidies in return for maintaining routes out of its Girona hub. While it was doing this, it was quietly building services through Barcelona Airport’s Terminal 2, which had become seriously underused after the opening of the new Terminal 1. You can bet they received preferential terms; any time you board a Ryanair flight through a jetty, as is the case there, you can be sure that someone else is paying for it. The dispute dragged on for months, until a resolution was announced. Ryanair never did withdraw from Girona, but it is no longer possible to fly from there to Scotland.
Now the Irish airline is at it again, in Scotland, using confrontational tactics in an attempt to bludgeon reduced landing charges out of BAA, the owners of Edinburgh Airport, and countering its rejection with a threat to cut five routes and with them, 300 jobs. That was uttered by Mr O’Leary in person, on a ‘flying’ visit to the capital. The problem he has on this occasion is that there is nothing to be lost in translation. No sooner had he made his threat than it was pointed out that four of the five routes in question do not yet exist, nor do a single one of those 300 jobs, since Ryanair has no direct employees at Edinburgh Airport, and accounts for no more than 20% of its turnover.
A glance at his utterances makes it just as clear that as its public face he can be his company’s worst enemy. Ryanair should be what it claims to be, ‘The world’s favourite airline’, not the most hated, as it probably is.
Quintin Jardine is a Scottish crime novelist, a ‘crusty but urbane Scot,
in his prime, and done with disclosing his age’.
