Tony Ryan

by Richard Aldous

  FOREWORD

  Perhaps in Tony’s mind he felt like George Orwell, who said, ‘Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.’

  Really I wish this book could have been penned by Tony, perhaps with Richard’s guidance. This is particularly true because he was such a great writer of letters and an avid reader of books. He did have a couple of conversations with a publisher, but nothing was ever concluded. We also talked on his sickbed about the completion of his story, and he was particularly focused on making sure that (to use his exact language) ‘some of the wankers’ in his life got a special mention.

  Our hope with this biography is that the story reflects the truth, humour and determination of his life, because that’s the kind of guy he was. This is the story of a single-minded young man from Tipperary who went on to be one of Ireland’s greatest entrepreneurs. With the significant economic crisis that faces Ireland and the rest of the world today, what we all need more than ever is a story such as Tony’s to illustrate the fact that Irish people can still be world leaders in business.

  I think regularly about what Tony would have done in the current crisis. What I know for certain is that it wouldn’t be standing still or lamenting our mistakes. That determination never to give up is the real lesson of this story.

  Declan Ryan

  Contents

  Cover

  Title page

  Foreword by Declan Ryan

  Chapter 1: It’s a long way from Tipperary

  Chapter 2: Salaryman

  Chapter 3: A new lease on life

  Chapter 4: Start-up

  Chapter 5: Going it alone

  Chapter 6: A pint, a paper and an electric shock

  Chapter 7: London (Luton) calling

  Chapter 8: Better to wear away than rust away

  Chapter 9: Crying all the way to the bank

  Chapter 10: Icarus melting

  Chapter 11: Project Rebound

  Chapter 12: Ryan redux

  Chapter 13: In the lion’s domain

  Chapter 14: ‘Ryanair is terrific’

  Chapter 15: A place better than Lyons

  A Note on Sources

  Acknowledgements

  Images

  Copyright

  About the Author

  About Gill & Macmillan

  Chapter 1

  IT’S A LONG WAY FROM TIPPERARY

  Lyons Demesne, Co. Kildare, Sunday 14 October 2007

  Everyone, including the man himself, had been determined that this day would not be a gloomy occasion. No expense or effort had been spared, and the weather, never the most reliable aspect of Irish life, had also more than done its bit. Under a bright autumnal sky, family, friends and admirers gathered at Tony Ryan’s country estate to say farewell. The setting was magnificent and one to which Tony had given so much of the later part of his life. When he took over the house a decade earlier it was in a state of decrepitude. Now lovingly and meticulously restored, it stood once again as a masterpiece of Georgian Ireland.

  On the lawn beside the formal gardens, replanted by Tony to the original design, the hundreds invited to this memorial service stood reminiscing. Childhood friends mixed with the titans of Irish business, including Tony’s exact contemporaries Michael Smurfit and Tony O’Reilly, and his protégé, the telecoms billionaire Denis O’Brien.

  As guests moved towards the lake for the service, there came roaring low and fast over Lyons a spectacular flypast, led by a new Boeing 737 jet aircraft flying under the flag of the airline that Tony had founded in 1985 and that bore his name—Ryanair—accompanied by a Challenger jet and a restored Stearman biplane. ‘Mourners were left agog,’ reported the Irish Times, ‘no doubt just as Ryan would have wanted.’

  The lakeside service, held not far from the Clonaghlis graveyard at the edge of the Lyons estate where Tony had been buried, was characterised by warmth and humour. Tony’s middle son, Declan, spoke movingly about his father. The eldest, Cathal, who himself would sadly pass away from rapid-onset cancer just months afterwards, perfectly imitated their father’s Tipperary accent. Shane, the youngest, read one of Tony’s own poems.

  Among the eulogies was one from Michael O’Leary, another of Tony’s protégés and by now the high-profile chief executive of Ryanair. The relationship between the two had been both close and highly combustible. Yet whatever their tussles—and they were legend—O’Leary was, says Declan Ryan, ‘like family’. Perhaps the most touching signal of O’Leary’s respect that day was that, for the first time in as long as anyone could remember, he was wearing a tie.

  O’Leary’s eulogy proclaimed Tony a ‘visionary’ and ‘one of the great Irishmen of the twentieth century’. Here, he said, was a man who had lived up to Tony’s father’s often-repeated aphorism that ‘it is better to wear away than rust away.’

  Not that Tony was without his faults and even his failures: ‘Tony Ryan wasn’t perfect; he wasn’t always right,’ O’Leary reminded everyone. ‘Tipperary is not the centre of the universe.’

  It was a funny line and one that poked gentle fun at Tony’s fierce and vocal pride in his native county. Yet, as O’Leary well knew, the one-liner was only half right.

  Certainly part of the Tony Ryan story is the rise of a lad born in a backwater of an impoverished country that was itself on the periphery of Europe. Indeed, many would have said that Tony was a boy from nowhere; the man himself would have said that he was in fact a boy from somewhere. But, crucially, that ‘somewhere’ was also the junction to somewhere else.

  ——

  Limerick Junction in Co. Tipperary may have been not much more than a small village, but it was famous throughout Ireland and beyond. It was here that the Dublin–Cork and Limerick–Waterford railway lines crossed at an angle of 90 degrees. That gave it the sense of a place from where you could quite literally go places. The station was famous everywhere, says Albert Maher in Signalman’s Memories, as ‘the most extraordinary railway junction in the world.’ Its unique layout comprised a long island platform with a range of bays and intricate points and switches. Trains arriving from any direction had to run clear of the station before making all kinds of complicated ‘reversings’ in order to get to a platform.

  The train coming from Waterford would begin this process at Keane’s Points, where, on 2 February 1936, Thomas Anthony Ryan was born in the small railway cottage beside the signal box during the worst snowstorm that anyone could remember that century. With no cot in the house, he was tucked in the top drawer of a chest of drawers, which soon led to a long-standing family joke that he had been ‘top drawer’ from the beginning.

  Tony was the first child of Martin and Elizabeth (‘Lily’) Ryan, who had married the previous year. The couple had met in the station restaurant in Mallow, Co. Cork, where Lily worked as a waitress. They shared a love of amateur dramatics, and in 1932 they had played alongside each other in a production of T. C. Murray’s melodrama Autumn Fire, put on by the Railway Men’s Dramatic Society of Limerick Junction. Later on, young Tony and his siblings—Catherine, Simon, May and Kell—would all be taught to recite by heart passages from Shakespeare, particularly Lily’s favourite, The Merchant of Venice.

  Martin Ryan was a Tipperary man from Solloghodbeg, near Limerick Junction. He was listed as being ten years old in the 1911 census, which also recorded his ability to read and write. When Tony was born, his father was a fireman on the railway, working out of Limerick Junction. He was a well-built, athletic man who played Gaelic football and hurling, winning the cup three years running for the local football team. Although he was a heavy smoker (Player’s Navy Cut, because the sailor on the packe
t was often said to be modelled on Charles Stewart Parnell), Martin placed a strong emphasis on clean living. Sports were encouraged. There were frequent trips by train to the coast for long walks. He was a teetotaller and a member of the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association. ‘The only bottle that would have been in the house contained holy water,’ Simon Ryan recalled.

  In photographs Martin always appeared smart and dapper. It left an impression on his children. Kell Ryan recalled that his father would only ever wear his work overalls once before putting them to be washed, which ensured that each day he left the house looking clean and pressed. It was a characteristic he passed on to his children, not least to Tony, who always took great pride in his appearance and later developed a taste for expensive handmade suits. In family photographs of the 1930s and 40s, whether informal or studio photographs for Confirmations and First Communions, the Ryans always looked well turned out. ‘We may have been poor,’ Simon remembered, ‘but we never looked poor.’

  Later, Tony would express frustration at self-made men who, like Dickens’s Mr Bounderby, loudly proclaim the depth of their childhood poverty. It was never a line that interested him. When pushed on the subject, he would briskly reply, ‘We were a very wealthy family even if we did not have any money.’ It was an attitude typical of the ‘respectable’ working class. Martin was industrious and keen to get on, and his immaculately laundered overalls and the boots ‘spit and polished’ to a gleam signalled an attitude to life, not just personal cleanliness.

  Although the Ryan household was staunchly ‘Tipp’, the matriarch at its centre was in fact a Cork girl. Lily’s father had been the head gamekeeper in Longueville House, near Mallow. The family lived in the gate lodge until her father’s early death, when they moved back into the town. Later the Ryan children would spend the summers with their grandmother in Mallow, which was handily placed on the Dublin–Cork main line and allowed the family to take advantage of the cheap rail fares that were a perk of Martin’s job.

  Lily remained a proud Corkwoman throughout her life. She was unafraid to stoke the traditional hurling rivalry between her home county and her new Tipp family. Simon recalled that she kept two garden gnomes at the front of the house, one painted red and white, which she called ‘Christy’, after the great Cork hurler Christy Ring, and another in blue and gold, called ‘Mickie’, after Tipperary’s Mickie ‘the Rattler’ Byrne, who lived nearby. ‘If Tipp had won, Mickie Byrne would make a point of walking past the house and slagging my mother about Christy,’ Simon remembered, ‘but if Tipp weren’t winning, or if Cork were, he’d be sure to choose an alternative route to avoid the gnomes.’

  Lily could be formidable too. Kell even recalled her hitting his father over the head with a frying pan after a prank went wrong. This strong woman also had a quick and enquiring mind. She was an enthusiastic reader, mostly of Irish biographies, and devoured the Irish Press each day. Her politics, like Martin’s, were straight up and down Fianna Fáil: Éamon de Valera was venerated; the Irish Independent was not allowed in the house. Lily would speak with great bitterness about the burning of Mallow in 1920. ‘If we were watching “Gone with the Wind”,’ Kell recalled, ‘the big scene with the burning of the plantation, she’d say, “That was Mallow. You should have seen the burning of Mallow.” It was typical Cork.’

  Martin, on the other hand, talked little about the War of Independence. He had been involved with the North Tipperary Flying Column—Dan Breen would later attend Martin’s funeral— and each year he attended the commemoration parade on Easter Sunday. On these occasions his children would sometimes get a rare glimpse of the frustrations underneath as Martin raged at all the people marching, noting that if the Easter Rising had been as well supported in the first place there might never have been a civil war in Ireland.

  In 1937, less than a year after Tony was born, Martin Ryan and his young family moved from Keane’s Points to 83 Railway Cottage, a small but not unattractive single-level house beside the station. It had a scullery and three rooms, with a bellows by the fire in the front room. For young Tony the most exciting aspect of the house as he grew up was that he could climb onto the roof with his father to watch the meets at the Limerick Junction racecourse. It was the beginning of a love affair with horses that would last his entire life.

  A mile and a half down the Limerick road was the local national school in Monard, where Tony began his education. Each day he would walk the three-mile round trip to the small school, which was run by two, sometimes three, teachers. A school photograph from the time shows forty-one pupils. Most of them look cheerful if not well off. Of the twelve children whose feet are visible, seven are not wearing shoes. Many of the children’s parents, like Martin, would have worked on the railway. All told, Tony and his classmates were typical and unremarkable for working-class children growing up in rural Ireland in the 1940s.

  The first big upheaval in Tony’s life came in 1944–5, when the Ryan family ‘emigrated’ to the cathedral town of Thurles—hallowed throughout Ireland as the birthplace of the GAA. In many ways the move was a step down for the Ryans. The nice cottage in Limerick Junction was replaced with extremely cramped accommodation in an upstairs room at 45 Butler Avenue, with only a curtain to divide the children from the parents at night. The Ryans would remain here for five years—a struggle for two adults and five growing children. ‘It was tiny, absolutely tiny,’ Kell remembered. Martin applied to be rehoused by the council but was turned down. Tony later said that watching his father tell his mother the bad news was a heartbreaking moment—perhaps his first introduction to the harshness of life without influence or privilege. ‘Tony always said it was this incident that drove his hunger,’ his son Declan recalls.

  For all the difficulties, the move from Limerick Junction was an important lesson for Tony in another way, even if he could not have articulated it at the time. He might have asked why his father had uprooted the family from the pleasant surroundings of their cottage for the inadequate accommodation in Butler Avenue. The answer was as simple as it was instructive: pure ambition. The reason for the move was that Martin had been promoted from fireman to engine driver on the railway. That move ‘up’ may in other ways have been a step down for the family; but for Martin Ryan it was the fulfilment of an aspiration that he had held all his life. And it was one that gave Tony a real pride that his father was now ‘someone’. For in 1940s Ireland few small boys were not attracted to the glamour and thrill of the life of the engine driver.

  Years afterwards Tony would reflect on the excitement he felt travelling on the footplate of a train beside his father:

  They stoked the gaping furnace with the poor wartime anthracite to build up the steam pressure and I was soon enveloped in that delicious childhood cocoon of excitement and terror, the red roaring furnace and the clattering steel and hissing steam and belching smoke coming to confirm my conditioned image of hell. But my father was there with his easy balance and [authority] and hell only could threaten. On the short journey to Goold’s Cross the men put the driver’s cap on my head and pointed out landmarks and the farms of friends and talked about horses and hurlers. They even fried the traditional engine-driver’s breakfast on the long steel shovel, but I was not going to be distracted. I was a train driver. I was going to be one for ever. My grandfather was one. My uncle was a Station Master at Bruree. My family was on the railway. Trains were in my blood. Nothing would change.

  That sense of direction, the confidence that in all likelihood he would end up on the railways himself, may explain why Tony as a boy did not seem particularly restless or ambitious. There are no stories of audacious moneymaking schemes or bold plans for the future. At Thurles Christian Brothers’ School he was a hard-working but quiet student. His mother later described him as ‘purposeful’, coming home in the evening and disappearing upstairs first to do his homework, then to head out to the field to play sports.

  Returning to his school in 1990, when he donated a computer room, Tony would praise t
he Christian Brothers above all for teaching him, as his father had, about the need for a good work ethic in life. ‘They demonstrated time and again that each of us, with encouragement and good example, can attain higher goals than we believed,’ he told his successor pupils. ‘I feel a deep sense of gratitude to the men who dedicated their careers to me and my generation.’

  In 1950 Martin’s risk in bringing everyone to Thurles finally paid off, when the Ryans moved to a smart new terraced council house at 10 Bohernamona Road (where the rival gnomes took up sentry outside). They were living in a more spacious house with front and back gardens and neat little steps on the path leading up to the front door. Tony, as the eldest, finally got his own bed.

  The move marked the beginning of a happy period in the family’s life. The children were settled at their schools, the girls going to the Presentation Convent. First Communions and Confirmations were made at Thurles Cathedral. Although no-one was too religious or had any special vocations or devotions, the boys joined the confraternity, and the girls were in the Legion of Mary.

  Tony was also an enthusiastic scout, which gave him his ‘first experience of leadership and the right kind of discipline’. He ‘adored’ the camping and long route marches as well as the ‘thrill’ of becoming a patrol leader.

  There was sporting success too, with Tony winning a county minor football medal with Thurles Sarsfield, although, in true Tipp fashion, he always preferred hurling. His friend Margaret Downes remembered how at parties he always ‘had a transistor to his ear listening to the match and oblivious to what was going on around him.’ Years later pilots in Tony’s employ would get used to the request made in far-flung places to find out the hurling score.

  School holidays in Ireland were long—from the end of May to the beginning of September—so over the summer months Tony and his brothers brought some extra money into the house by ‘footing the turf’ for Bord na Móna. Early each morning a truck would pick the boys up in Thurles to take them out to the bog. There they would board a narrow-gauge ‘bog train’ that would transport them three or four miles out. A foreman would give each a ‘spread’ to cut—payment was by the spread, however long it took. ‘It was brilliant craic,’ remembered Simon, ‘five or six days’ work would mean a guy taking home around three pounds, ten shillings a week—good money in those days.’ But they had to work for it. ‘This was literally backbreaking work,’ Kell recalled. ‘I mean you were stooped down all the time, getting things off the ground, back up again. Nobody had gloves. The wind would be blowing, or sometimes you’d get sunstroke.’ Tony would later reflect that, for all the ups and downs of life in business, ‘I always thought it was a better job than cutting turf in the bog—now that’s real work.’