Tony Ryan

by Richard Aldous

  was behind the desk, and I was out sweeping the floor. He must have seen an elderly woman struggling with her bags, because he came over and said to me, ‘Do you think that lady needs help?’ so I went over to help her. He had wanted to teach me the lesson, you see, that if someone was struggling, I should go and help. He could have done it himself, but he understood that a young fella will never learn that way. I never forgot that.

  In the mid-1960s it would have been easy to see why Tony might have stayed in Cork Airport all his life. Mairéad and the family were happily settled in their lovely new house. His widowed mother, a Corkwoman herself, was nearby. He was popular in work. Ireland, in the midst of the Lemass-Whitaker revolution, seemed on the way up—no longer a place to leave but now somewhere to stay.

  But while his fires of entrepreneurial ambition were yet to be ignited, Tony was restless for advancement within Aer Lingus. In 1966 he was offered the chance to go to O’Hare Airport in Chicago as deputy station manager. Chicago was an important part of Aer Lingus’s transatlantic operation, and the promotion was a step up in all kinds of ways. But Mairéad, so happy in Cork, was unsure. It was such a long way away. Post was slow. Transatlantic phone calls cost a fortune. The move would be a real upheaval for the family.

  Kell Ryan, Tony’s younger brother, remembers that the family agonised about the choice for ages.

  I was in his house in Cork the day he had to make the call to say whether he was going to accept the job or not. I’ll never forget that, because he had to make the decision whether he was going to uproot from Cork to America. He said he could become station manager of Cork eventually; it was a nice job and he had just built the house with his father-in-law. I guess if he’d decided he was going to stay in Ireland that would have been it.

  While every personal factor in 1966 told Tony to stay, ambition instructed him to make the move—just as it had done when his father had moved the family from Limerick Junction to Thurles two decades earlier. Kell reflected:

  Funny, isn’t it? Yes or no; the road divides, and what do you do? If it had gone the other way, he probably never would have left Ireland—would have got manager at Cork Airport and probably stayed there.

  Tony departed alone for Chicago, bringing the family out a few months later. He did his best to ease the transition for them, renting a pleasant bungalow in Arlington Heights, about twenty-five miles north-west of downtown Chicago. More rural then than now, the town was only fourteen miles or so from the airport and had a very strong Catholic population. There were also echoes of Limerick Junction to be found, not least in the famous Arlington Park racecourse and the Southwest Chief railway line that ran through the town, taking passengers from Chicago to Los Angeles.

  Now aged thirty and occupying a responsible position in Aer Lingus, Tony brought a new seriousness and maturity to his job in O’Hare Airport. ‘He worked so hard,’ Declan recalls, ‘that we didn’t see him a huge amount. That’s primarily how I remember him in my early years, as incredibly hard-working.’

  The transatlantic flight to Shannon left late at night, so most days Tony would not be home until midnight or later. At weekends or on holidays Cathal and Declan might be taken into the airport as a treat with their father. Both were put on their best behaviour. ‘It was a respect thing,’ says Declan. ‘You knew you could have a good time, but you also knew you weren’t to mess at the airport.’ With Aer Lingus, Tony told his boys, ‘you’re representing Ireland.’

  Working for the airline kept Tony in close contact with Ireland, but living in Chicago gave him an introduction to a different way of life. He became more worldly, observing, although from a safe distance, the race riots and anti-war demonstrations that put Chicago at the top of the global news agenda. More personally, he was changed by the culture and ethos of American life.

  Tony quickly came to admire the American ethic of hard work and customer service, and he soon concluded that he needed to change his own laid-back approach. For the first time in his career Tony began to worry less about being good humoured and well liked, and more about setting demanding standards. That didn’t always make him popular. Years afterwards he told Marian Finucane of RTE that from this time onwards he began to feel like an ‘interloper’ at Aer Lingus. Hard work for management seemed more frowned upon than encouraged.

  He was unafraid to give his own airport staff a kick up the backside when he felt they needed it. On taking his annual leave he horrified senior clerical staff by appointing an engineer as his stand-in. ‘That rocked a few boats,’ remembered Derek O’Brien, an Aer Lingus colleague. When staff members complained Tony told them, ‘I don’t care he’s an engineer: he’s the best man for the job. Full stop.’ It was a story that soon did the rounds throughout the company.

  It was also in Chicago that Tony began to emerge as the more familiar hard-bargaining character he would later become. Pat Deasy, his station manager at O’Hare, saw that close up. He may even have been the first to be outfoxed by Tony in a negotiation. When Deasy moved house Tony agreed to buy his previous one. They met at the attorney’s office to sign all the paperwork amid handshakes and much backslapping. Only as they were leaving did Deasy realise that he had no cheque from Tony. He mentioned it and was stunned by the response. ‘Pat, you know my salary! Where the feck do you think I would get that sort of money? You’ll get paid, all right, but you’ll have to wait for it.’

  ‘Pat did wait for it, and he got paid,’ recalled David Kennedy, later chief executive of Aer Lingus, ‘but it was quite some time afterwards.’

  The job Tony did in Chicago got him noticed back in Dublin as a hard-working, capable and imaginative manager. In 1968 he was rewarded with a transfer to JFK Airport in New York as station manager, with the task of organising the airline’s move to a new terminal. That complex logistical exercise would demand not just long hours but also an ability to think on his feet as, inevitably (like Heathrow Terminal 5 in 2008), things went wrong. ‘He’d shown a maverick approach in Chicago,’ recalls O’Brien, who became Tony’s duty manager in JFK. ‘He brought that same sense of not fitting between the tram tracks to New York.’

  Tony’s role in the terminal relocation introduced him to more new business approaches. He became an important and increasingly influential member of the airport operation committee—demonstrating once again the reputation Ireland has acquired in all kinds of international arenas for competence and diplomacy. He forged close links with his counterpart in Lufthansa, and together they became highly effective advocates of airline rights. Many of these issues would continue as later preoccupations, not least in Tony’s attempts to break the monopolies that surrounded fuelling, ground-transportation companies and union labour.

  Tony also got a reputation for running rings around officialdom in the airport. This was particularly the case when it came to employing casual workers. Tony used Irish nationals whenever he could, and those from Tipperary most of all. That brought him into conflict with the airport authorities, less for the Tipperary favouritism than for the failure to employ enough American citizens. After several formal warnings he was hauled in front of a disciplinary board, which expressed its displeasure at his hiring record. Tony’s reaction was as simple as it was devious. Sure, he said, we don’t employ enough American citizens, and that is to be regretted. But we’re no different from any other airline. If you go over to the Air France desk the prerequisite for getting a job is that you can speak French. With Lufthansa it’s German, and Iberia Spanish. ‘So,’ Tony told the board, ‘if you want to work for Aer Lingus, which is an Irish airline, you have to be able to speak Irish, our national language.’ He won the argument, although maybe he was lucky the board didn’t immediately test the Aer Lingus staff on their Gaeilge—‘and himself,’ adds Tony’s brother Kell. It was a lesson in how to stay a hair’s breadth on the right side of the regulatory authorities.

  Tony also had other battles to fight closer to home. His most startling confrontations were with the airline pilots. In t
he public mind of the 1960s, glamour and prestige still surrounded these sultans of the skies, with their gold-braided lapels, Ray-Ban sunglasses and exotic duty-free cigarettes. By now Tony loathed them as a group, despite once having wanted to join their ranks. ‘The pilots used to drive him nuts,’ Declan says, remembering his father’s rages about them at home.

  Seán Braiden agrees. ‘There was a culture that the pilots were the be all and end all of flying,’ he says. ‘Tony never believed in that. He never gave them any space when it came to operational decisions and would be tough. He had his own ideas about how things should be done.’

  Above all, that meant getting planes out on time. When Tony felt that pilots were getting in the way of that, and not being team players, he didn’t hesitate to tell them in the strongest possible terms.

  Eventually the wrangles between Tony and the pilots coming in and out of JFK Airport became so intense that Arthur Walls, general manager of Aer Lingus, flew out to New York to see what was going on. What he discovered, Derek O’Brien remembered, was ‘a station manager who was very, very effective.’ It was an important moment for Tony, because it put him on the general manager’s radar as a rising star in the company.

  New York taught Tony that he needed to be tough to do his job properly. It also taught him how to enforce his will through a loyal praetorian guard. Christy Ryan, who had worked alongside Tony from day 1 in Aer Lingus, now joined him at JFK as deputy station manager. Tony knew he could trust Christy 100 per cent. Not only had they long been friends and workmates, but Christy had already shown his personal loyalty. Years earlier he had for several months swapped his Heathrow job for the Cork one when a member of Tony’s family needed a series of operations in London. It was indicative of the kind of loyalty that Tony could inspire in those close to him.

  In New York, Christy became Tony’s trusted eyes and ears with the staff, always keeping him up to speed on problems and gossip. Moreover, Christy’s taciturn manner helped reinforce the atmosphere of efficiency and serious work to be done that Tony sought to cultivate. It was all a million miles away from the days back in Shannon, when ‘all the effort went into avoiding being spotted doing nothing.’

  Tony’s position as station manager brought with it advantages as well as new challenges for his family. The Ryans had moved to Long Island, living first in Deer Park, Suffolk County, then moving to Garden City, Nassau County, which had been founded by a wealthy Irishman, Alexander Turney Stewart, in the middle of the nineteenth century. ‘Garden City especially was a fantastic place to grow up as a kid,’ remembers Declan, who recalls wonderful sports facilities and good schools. The family lived in a safe, prosperous area in a comfortable house, with the middle-class ‘mod cons’ of a colour television and a new car.

  Not that Tony had much time to enjoy the pleasures of suburban Long Island. ‘You’d see the other dads, doing normal jobs, coming home at five o’clock,’ Declan remembers, ‘while Tony was doing twelve-hour days, getting home late after the last two flights to Ireland went out around eight o’clock each night.’ That left Mairéad with most of the responsibility in bringing up the two boys, who became three in 1971 when another son, Shane, was born.

  Aside from taking the boys to the occasional baseball game at Shea Stadium, Tony’s principal role in the house was to enforce discipline and to back up Mairéad. He was never afraid to give the boys a good clip round the ear, and the worst crime of all in the household was to cheek their mother. ‘Tony became very affectionate in later years,’ Declan says, ‘but in the early days he was a very stern man.’

  Shane, as the youngest, and Declan to an extent, were able to sidestep that sterner side, but Cathal often found himself in the line of fire. Later on, Tony came to adore his eldest son’s wit and devil-may-care attitude to life. ‘He was the Jack Nicholson of our family,’ Declan says laconically. In the 1970s, however, Tony was concerned that Cathal was not showing enough seriousness towards life.

  And there was also something deeper. By the time Shane was born the Ryans had been away from Ireland for five years. Tony missed it himself, but more significantly he had the unwelcome realisation that his children were growing up not to be Irish at all. They had American, not Irish, accents; followed NFL and baseball, not GAA; and knew more American than Irish history. Moreover, whatever image they had of Ireland, it was not of Tipperary and the Great Southern Railway but of the bombing and destruction that were beginning to fill the American news broadcasts.

  This recognition provoked a strong reaction in Tony: in 1971 he decided to repatriate Cathal to Ireland. There his eldest son would attend one of the country’s most prestigious private schools, the Jesuit-run Clongowes Wood, which was famous for its intellectual rigour and its sporting prowess on the rugby field.

  This was a big move for the family in all kinds of ways. By sending Cathal, and subsequently the two other boys, to Clongowes, Tony was making a statement about his commitment to the culture of his birth, which was fundamentally different from the Irish-American one. ‘He wanted to get the Irishness back into us,’ Declan explains. Tony also put on display his own ambition and his unflinching willingness to take hard, even harsh, decisions. The choice of Clongowes itself put aside sentiment, as Glenstal Abbey in Co. Limerick, or Rockwell College in Co. Tipperary, might have been more obvious choices. What united all these options was that they were expensive, involving considerable sacrifice for the Ryans on Tony’s public-sector salary.

  Cathal’s being sent to school in Ireland was a wrenching experience for the whole family, not least for the boy himself. ‘Tony would lean over him and say, “Don’t cry in front of your mother”,’ Declan remembers, ‘and he understood it, that you don’t upset your mom.’

  In many ways the move was as difficult for Declan as it was for Cathal. Suddenly he lost his elder brother, who had played the role of hero and principal playmate. Now there was only a baby in the house. ‘It seemed gas the first time Cathal went, and I was delighted to see the back of him,’ Declan recalls, ‘and then I missed him like hell and got upset at Christmas when he was going back and forth.’

  That was an emotion shared by Mairéad, who from this time onwards found that her own homesickness became close to unbearable. Five years earlier she had reluctantly agreed to leave Cork, where she had been so happy, to make the move to the United States. Her experience had been far from the American dream. Tony’s long hours kept him away from the house for most of the day, leaving her without much support to pull together the threads of family life. ‘I would say eighty to ninety per cent of the parenting was with my mom,’ Declan recalls. ‘“Sympathy” would not be a word that you would use to describe Tony in those years. Mom fulfilled that role in our family.’

  Mairéad did a fine job raising the boys, but by 1971 the strain on her was acute. She had gone to Dublin for the birth of Shane, but no sooner had they returned to New York than the baby contracted meningitis. Shane was rushed into intensive care to save his life, and the family had to endure the gut-wrenching experience of seeing him given the last rites. That ordeal forged a special bond with Shane for Tony, who never forgot that his youngest son was lucky to be alive.

  There was more drama that Christmas when Cathal returned to Long Island for the school holiday. In many ways this was an extremely happy time for the family, not least because everyone at home in New York found it hilarious how Cathal had ‘gone posh’ after a few months at Clongowes, saying please and thank you all the time and eating everything off his plate. ‘Tony was roaring laughing at that,’ Declan recalls.

  The good humour only lasted until the end of the holidays. Cathal’s return to school was, if anything, even harder on everyone than when he had left the previous September. Whatever instructions Tony might have given to the boys about not crying in front of their mother, it must have been apparent to him by this stage just how unhappy everyone had become. It can hardly have come as any surprise when, in 1972, Mairéad told him she wanted to go home to Irel
and.

  In so many ways Mairéad was pushing at an open door. Tony missed Ireland himself, especially the hurling and his beloved Tipperary. Any excitement about life in America had long worn off. In an odd way, Tony didn’t even live in the United States: his real life was the no-man’s-land of the JFK international terminal. But he did worry about the effect of living in America on his children. Cathal had already been sent home for an Irish education. The same would soon happen to Declan, who was even more American than his older brother, having spent a larger proportion of his life there. That would leave Shane on his own, growing up as an all-American boy. In the early 1970s this meant the context of what one historian calls ‘the decade of nightmares’ and the sense that drugs and crime were out of control in nearby New York City. Childhood innocence seemed under threat even in the suburbs of Garden City. ‘Long Island was a great place to live,’ Declan remembers, ‘but you don’t want to go through your teens there. You grow up too quick.’

  On almost every level Tony knew by 1972 that the time had come to go home. It was the right thing to do for his family. Everyone missed Ireland. He could even take pride in having done a good job at JFK as station manager, having overseen the move to the new terminal and managed the greater demands put on the staff by the new Aer Lingus Boeing 747 ‘Jumbo’ jets. All in all, Tony had run a tight operation that was valued by the management back in Dublin.

  Yet whatever success Tony might have had as station manager in JFK, the culture of the airline was unfavourable. ‘It was not something you did in Aer Lingus,’ explains duty manager Derek O’Brien. ‘If you went abroad they did not easily or readily let you back home.’

  As station manager at the heart of the airline’s transatlantic operations, Tony already had the most glamorous and interesting overseas posting. Heathrow would have made a good transfer, but Mairéad had not been much happier in London than in the United States. In the end, says O’Brien, Tony had no choice other than ‘to go back to Dublin in a cap-in-hand way’ to ask for a transfer into head office.