Tony Ryan

by Richard Aldous

  It was also during the years at 10 Bohernamona Road that one of the deepest and most important chapters opened in Tony’s life. In his Intermediate Cert year, aged sixteen, he began to notice the attractive girl who passed the house each morning on her way to school. Eventually he got to chatting to her, and they clicked. Five years later these childhood sweethearts married. Mairéad was literally ‘the girl around the corner’, living in Mitchel Street, from where she could see the tower of St Patrick’s Cathedral. Although her name was also Ryan, they were not related. ‘I always used to smile when I was a child,’ Tony and Mairéad’s son Declan later recalled, ‘because my grandfather [Mairéad’s father] and my grandmother [Tony’s mother] always used to call each other Mr Ryan and Mrs Ryan. I’d get a kick out of that.’

  The Ryans of Mitchel Street were builders and, as such, better off than their namesakes in Bohernamona Road. ‘I’d say there was an element that she was a little bit above Tony,’ Declan recalls, ‘which actually got right up his nose, but there was always respect for them.’ Later on, Tony’s father-in-law would help him build a family home on the outskirts of Cork, at the Blackrock Castle end, high up on the hill, with beautiful views.

  In 1954 Tony took his Leaving Cert and finished at Thurles CBS. There never seems to have been any expectation that he would move on to university. Even had he wanted to continue his education it would have meant winning a scholarship, most likely to University College, Cork. Although he was hard-working and bright, Tony was never exceptional academically. As a temporary measure he took a job in the sugar factory for that autumn’s sugarbeet campaign.

  Working in the sugar factory was never what Tony Ryan wanted to do with his life. It was travel that was in his blood, although by the 1950s he had changed his mode of transport. If the boy had wanted to be a train driver like his father, the man was attracted to aircraft as a newer, even more dramatic way of getting around.

  ‘He had ambitions to join the Air Corps,’ Kell recalled, ‘but there was some problem with colour and his eyesight.’ It was a blow to Tony’s ambitions, but he was not to be deterred. He was advised that his colour-blindness, which was not severe, would not necessarily stop him becoming a commercial pilot. Yet, even more so than going to university, training to become a pilot was an expensive business. Most of the pilots in Aer Lingus were already highly experienced and had trained in Britain or the United States. So when Tony saw an advertisement for a traffic assistant, the lowest rung on the ladder in Aer Lingus, he took the chance that it might some day lead to an opportunity to learn to fly. Instead, it was the first step on a journey that would see him transform the world of commercial aviation.

  To join the national airline in the 1950s brought with it a measure of social respectability. Both Tony’s parents were proud to see him ‘getting on’. But only a few short months after he had begun working at Shannon Airport, tragedy struck the Ryan household and changed everything. In the spring of 1955 Martin was uncharacteristically taken ill, with what looked like the flu. He was an extremely active man, rarely missing a day of work in his life, so he was anxious to get back to his engine. On 30 April he struggled into work, where he was again taken ill. His supervisor would not let him on the train and told him to have a cup of tea and go home. Under protest Martin agreed. Getting up on his bike and pedalling off, he suffered a massive heart attack outside Thurles station and died. Martin Ryan was fifty-four years of age.

  Martin’s early death brought immediate hardship to 10 Bohernamona Road. Lily now had to bring up a young family, including Kell, who was just ten, on a small CIE pension. In order to make ends meet, the family made the heart-wrenching but all too common decision to send the eldest girl, Catherine (Rena), to live with an aunt in the United States. From there she would send back money to help keep the rest of the family. Tony also had new responsibilities, as the head of the family. Each weekend he made the fifty-mile train journey from Shannon to Thurles to see his mother, always giving her money from his pay packet and bringing Urney chocolates as a treat for Saturday night.

  His father’s death left its mark on Tony in other ways. No doubt Martin’s heavy smoking was a contributory factor in his death, but just as important were the long hours and the exhausting work he had undertaken all his life. Tony concluded that his father had worked himself to death. ‘The long hours he worked had a very significant influence on me,’ he later recalled. ‘When people say to me, toadying, “You work very hard,” my reply is that I don’t work physically as hard as others.’

  Tony never lost his admiration or affection for his father. He always kept close to hand the book Glenanaar by Canon Sheehan, which he had inscribed and given to his father as a last Christmas present. Family and employees alike would lose count of the number of times he quoted his father’s sayings, such as ‘The strongest steel comes from the hottest fire’ and, as Michael O’Leary would recall in Tony’s eulogy, ‘It is better to wear away than rust away.’

  The sense of a life cut short by a lifetime of hard, physical work was something that never left Tony Ryan. Perhaps it was no coincidence that he would later tell Poetry Ireland that his favourite poem, ‘An Spailpín Fánach’ (‘The itinerant labourer’), was one that he had learnt in school, and it must have burnt deep in 1955. ‘For ever more I will not go to Cashel | Selling or bartering my health, | At the hiring-fair, sitting by the wall, | Or a lounger at the side of the street …’

  Martin’s death marked a coming of age for Tony Ryan. Now Shannon offered him the opportunity to honour his father’s memory by making something of his life.

  Chapter 2

  SALARYMAN

  For a young man to have employment in 1950s Ireland was an achievement in itself, but to have a position in Shannon Airport was more than just a job: it felt like a gateway to the world.

  Living in the Ireland of Tony Ryan’s childhood, although not particularly unhappy for him personally, had been a bleak experience for most people. By the time Tony started work, in 1955, unemployment, emigration and the cost of living were all out of control. Some forty thousand people were leaving the country each year. The 1955 census showed the population of the Republic at its lowest level ever. It was a crisis of confidence as much as of economic management. Three different Governments had been elected between 1948 and 1954, each one seemingly worse than the last. Ireland seemed locked in a deadly tailspin.

  Yet, in a stroke of good timing, Tony started his working life at the exact moment that Ireland was turning a corner. That same year Seán Lemass of Fianna Fáil gave his famous ‘100,000 jobs’ speech. It marked the beginning of a new approach to economic thinking, developed in consultation with progressive public servants of the era, including Todd Andrews and T. K. Whitaker, that would see the country launched on a path to modernisation.

  For many, Shannon Airport already seemed like an outlier for this new approach. Global, innovative and identifiably contemporary, it offered a glimpse of what Ireland might become.

  The west coast had been a central feature of transatlantic air travel since the first flight across the Atlantic, in 1919. Ireland provided the most obvious stop-off for planes from North America. In 1937 the Government, in a move that was ahead of its time, started work on a new airport at Rineanna in Co. Clare. By the end of the Second World War the new facility—now called Shannon Airport—had four concrete runways, including one of 10,000 feet that could easily deal with the biggest and most powerful aircraft of the day.

  On 24 October 1945 the first scheduled commercial flight, an American Overseas Airlines DC-4, flew in from the United States. Soon afterwards all the major American carriers began using the airport. Overnight, Shannon became the most important stop-off on the transatlantic route.

  Two years later Shannon’s appeal was increased through another innovative move by the state: the introduction of the first customs-free area. This development not only provided international passengers with duty-free goods but also enticed businesses to move to Shannon
on the promise of paying no import or export taxes. It was the beginning of a brave new entrepreneurial world that would see Ireland emerge over the decades as a truly global centre of aviation expertise. (For example, Ireland today is a global centre for aircraft leasing, with assets worth more than €80 billion under management, accounting for half the world’s fleet of leased aircraft.)

  Tony Ryan’s arrival at Shannon in the mid-1950s was timed to perfection. Ten years later and the airport would already have begun its steady decline, as newer, longer-range aircraft lessened the need for a Shannon stop-off. But in the fifties Tony seemed to be riding the crest of the future. His birth in Limerick Junction had put him on the ‘main line’ of national life. Now the airport saw him even better placed. Ireland may have been struggling as a poor outpost on the edge of western Europe; but in Shannon they were at the centre of the transatlantic world.

  Tony’s starting salary as an Aer Lingus ‘counter-jumper’—so named because they lugged baggage up and over the check-in desks—was the reasonable sum of £4 8s 9d, although by the time he had paid for digs in Limerick, bus fares and contributions to help out his mother, there was not much left at the end of a week.

  Tony began work on the same day as Christy Ryan (no relation), who quickly became his closest friend and later was godfather to his son Declan. Years afterwards, Tony and Christy together would found Ryanair. Back in the day, they were inseparable, particularly before Tony’s marriage in 1958.

  Mick O’Carroll, who began work at Shannon the following year, recalls that Tony eventually got himself a Vespa scooter, which he would use to get to the airport, with Christy on the back, riding pillion. ‘Tony was one of the few people to have a scooter,’ O’Carroll remembers, ‘while the rest of us were stuck getting the bus down.’

  Life for a young traffic assistant (the women were called ‘ground hostesses’) in Shannon was a mixture of excitement and the humdrum. Work was based on a four-shift cycle that ran twenty-four hours a day. On any given day Tony might find himself working on the check-in or cargo desk, on the Ship’s Papers desk, making sure the paperwork for all aircraft was in order, or in the office on the phones. But the most hectic times always came when big American or British transatlantic carriers touched down.

  ‘Part of our job was to meet every aircraft as it arrived,’ recalled one traffic assistant, Frankie Walsh, quoted by Valerie Sweeney in Shannon Airport. ‘We had to be on the ramp, in all weathers, ten minutes before the estimated time of the aircraft. We stood there in the rain, hail and snow.’ When a plane taxied to a halt, steps would be pushed into place. Then the traffic assistants would board the plane, check the paperwork and ensure that there were no diseases or animals on board. The captain would have to sign to say that the plane had been sprayed before the doors had been opened. ‘While the passengers still remained on board, the traffic assistant had to disembark,’ Frankie recalls, ‘go into the main building to deliver the clearance forms, one copy to the health department, one to immigration, one to customs. Only when these procedures were completed to everyone’s satisfaction could a ground hostess mount the steps and make an announcement to the passengers that they could disembark the flight.’

  Staff members would often find themselves dealing with unhappy passengers traipsing in the rain to a bus or across the open air ramp into the terminal building. ‘We tried to provide people with umbrellas,’ says Frankie, ‘but we lost so many of them when they were whipped out of people’s hands by the wind we had to abandon the idea.’

  Once the passengers were safely in the terminal, an assistant’s job was still only half done. Ship’s Papers and manifests had to be prepared for every transit destination. Load sheets and health certificates had to be issued. Only then could an aircraft be cleared for departure.

  Transatlantic flights arrived in Shannon either at night or else early in the morning. At such times it was ‘all go’ for the traffic assistants. Daytime shifts were more relaxed. ‘All the effort went into avoiding being spotted doing nothing,’ O’Carroll recalled with a smile. There was always more talking to be done about the hurling than about aircraft.

  That didn’t change much when Tony got a promotion to shift supervisor in 1958. Christy was on his shift, as was a young student, Bronwyn Conroy, the niece of Shannon’s lead engineer and later a well-known beauty consultant in Dublin. Conroy recalls that working for Tony was ‘really good fun’, because ‘he was always in good humour and could be extremely funny.’ He even allowed her to improve the beauty routines for the ground hostesses. ‘When I arrived, all the Shannon girls did was curl their eyelashes and wear Sari Peach lipstick by Gala,’ she says. ‘By the time I left, nine months later, they all had proper beauty routines!’ If a plane landed ahead of schedule Bronwyn even persuaded Tony that the women couldn’t possibly go out to meet passengers without having done their faces properly, so it would be all male assistants who were sent onto the tarmac to meet the aircraft instead.

  Tony’s promotion to shift supervisor ahead of Christy, who had started on the same day, suggests that the management at Shannon recognised his potential above that of his contemporaries. Clearly he had an easy charm and a practical way about him. Conroy recalls that in her nine months at Shannon, during which time Aer Lingus began its own transatlantic flights for the first time, she was run off her feet. But Tony was known for getting everything done with great good humour, and consequently ‘he was liked by everyone’.

  Developing a strong team ethic was something that would be important to him throughout his business career, although achieving that through good humour was not. Tony never lost his ability to charm, but those working for him much later on were more likely to be on the receiving end of the ‘hairdryer’ treatment than of a softly-softly approach.

  That new abrasiveness was something that on occasion could surprise or even upset those who had once worked with him at Aer Lingus, when he had been known as a nice guy. Seán Braiden and his wife, Olive, for example, had worked with Tony in those early days. Tony stayed regularly in their apartment on trips to London in the 1960s. When Seán was seconded to Tony’s company Guinness Peat Aviation in the 1970s, Olive was dismayed by phone calls to the house at three or four in the morning and by getting ‘barked at’ by Tony demanding to know where her husband was. ‘I was always very fond of Tony,’ she recalls, ‘but he was a total dictator and difficult to work with. When it came to business, he did what he needed to do.’

  That had not been Tony’s way at Shannon. Indeed, having shown some management potential, everything suggested that he was on course to be a good company man working in the semi-state sector before retiring with a carriage clock and a generous final salary pension. He had not yet acquired the edge that would see him succeed in business. Neither did he strike anyone at Shannon as being a budding entrepreneur. ‘Tony was just an ordinary colleague in those days,’ O’Carroll says. ‘No-one suspected he had this entrepreneurial spirit, and anyone who says they did notice is lying!’

  That ordinariness would be the unspectacular story of the first twenty years of Tony’s working life as he moved steadily up the company ladder at Aer Lingus. In 1959, a year after marrying Mairéad, he was transferred to London for a four-year stint, during which he was stationed briefly in the West End ticket office at Bond Street and then at Heathrow Airport. The couple had digs in Maida Vale, where their first son, Cathal Martin Ryan, was born. Not being so dependent on the schedule of transatlantic flights in London, Tony could enjoy a more normal home life with his young family, although, like most fathers at the time, he didn’t do much in the way of changing nappies. Britain in the late 1950s had ‘never had it so good’. That brought with it some nice perks for the Ryans: Tony purchased his first used car, and the family got a black-and-white television.

  Although Tony enjoyed the hubbub of working at Heathrow, Mairéad badly missed Ireland. It was for this reason that when the opportunity came in 1963 to move to the recently opened Cork Airport, Tony jum
ped at it, knowing how happy it would make his wife. The three years that followed would be among the happiest of their married life. Mairéad was thrilled to be home. A brother for Cathal—Declan Francis Ryan—was born in their first year back. Mairéad’s father and Tony began work on the beautiful new house on the hill, with its lovely aspect overlooking the River Lee, just twenty minutes from the airport.

  Aer Lingus was heavily invested in making Cork Airport a success, so recruitment for the new venture had been highly competitive. Tony was appointed as a duty manager, although the job, which included shunting luggage from the check-in desk out to the waiting plane, often in the rain, was less white-collar than it sounded.

  Colleagues again remember him as a good-humoured and practical supervisor. He was also a good motivator. Mairead Mason, who later undertook PR for Tony in GPA, recalled an eminent surgeon telling her about working for Aer Lingus as a student. The doctor told her that Tony