Tony Ryan

by Richard Aldous

  Knight believed he knew the answer to that question. He had his eye on just the man to replace Tony and now set out to headhunt him. On 19 April he wrote confidentially to Kennedy that the ‘ideal candidate for this position would be Maurice Foley, having in mind the changing needs of the company in its next stage of development.’ Foley had been a fierce critic of what he saw as Tony’s casual approach to the board. He was widely admired, not least by Tony himself, for his fine strategic and analytical frame of mind. Knight conceded that

  you would find it very difficult indeed, if not impossible, to release Maurice for this appointment. However, I think that you will agree with me that it is critically important that we ensure the continued success of this remarkable company which, up until now, has owed so much to the personal drive and initiative of Tony Ryan. It could, in my view, very well start to lose a good deal of its impetus when Tony is not available if we are obliged to settle for a new Chief Executive of mediocre calibre.

  Eventually, after much persuasion, Kennedy concurred. Foley was approached and he expressed interest. The process of succession had begun.

  Tony initially expressed enthusiasm about bringing Foley aboard, thinking neither that Kennedy would release him from Aer Lingus nor that the candidate himself would be interested in the position. As the transition process began to move forward, however, the reality of losing executive control of GPA began to hit him.

  Tony showed his full range of emotions at a hastily arranged meeting with Knight in London on 1 June 1982. He expressed resentment at being kept out of the loop. ‘It seems incongruous’, he protested, ‘that as a significant shareholder and Chief Executive, the conditions and terms for the new Chief Executive are taking place deliberately without any reference to me.’ There was also anger at being pushed aside, as ‘I do feel my current role is being usurped.’ And for the first time in the process, Tony revealed a touch of vulnerability. ‘I genuinely am worried,’ he finally admitted to Knight.

  His concerns were well founded. On 7 June, Knight wrote to Tony in a tone that was so off-hand that the chairman could hardly have made it clearer that the Ryan era at GPA was nearing its end. Obviously he hoped Tony would stay in touch with GPA, but ‘any future role for you in the company must be very dependent indeed on agreement and understanding between you and your successor.’ Maurice Foley had already been offered the chief executive post, Knight casually reported, so perhaps Tony could ‘talk to Maurice’. Knight hoped to get everything tied up by July ‘so that we can make public our intentions before too many rumours start to emerge.’

  Tony was horrified. Overconfidence had resulted in the imminent loss of control of the company he had founded in 1975. The previous financial year he had made almost £10 million in profits for GPA, five times more than projected profits for the company. He knew he had ‘an intuitive feel for aviation’ and a leadership style that got results. Now the company was saying, ‘Thanks for that,’ and moving on without him. With projected profits of £32 million for the period 1981–5, that would be leaving someone else to cash in on his hard work—literally, in fact, as he had already told Knight he would be selling his 10 per cent interest in the company.

  Back in Kilboy, alone, it all seemed like madness. A small part of Tony had meant the resignation offer. He was forty-five years old, working a punishing schedule, travelling hundreds of thousands of miles a year. No-one could maintain that lifestyle. Friends had heard him talk more about his father, who had died young after a lifetime of punishing physical work. Inevitably there were thoughts about packing it all in and enjoying the money he had made. Then there had been a contradictory impulse. Tony remained a man of ambition. He had ideas and strategies for changing aviation. Yet in GPA he was still thwarted by Aer Lingus. In the light of the Irelandia experience, he had thought, Why not just say, ‘Feck ’em’? and then do precisely that as their competition.

  Confronted now with the reality of losing everything he had built up, Tony understood that he had made a terrible misjudgement. Instead of cursing himself, he addressed the problem head-on with an act that was as shameless as it was brazen: he simply withdrew his resignation.

  On 16 June 1982 Tony wrote to Knight and the GPA board not in apology but in confrontation. ‘Your letter of 7th June has not alleviated my worries about the position which has now developed within the Company,’ he announced. ‘The matters to which my resignation gave rise have not been resolved, and more seriously, a general situation has developed which is extremely threatening to the Company’s welfare.’ Moreover, ‘as a shareholder’, he was ‘very concerned by your statement you are very far down the line in your discussion with [Maurice Foley].’ Therefore he had only one course of action. ‘The situation leaves me with no alternative but to now withdraw my resignation as chief executive.’ In an aside for Knight, he added, ‘Geoffrey, we genuinely have a difference of opinion. Indeed I am disappointed that you cannot accept the priorities as I see them.’

  It was a defiant performance and one that might just as well have come from Winning through Intimidation, the book Tony had enjoyed so much in Bangkok. In the end his chutzpah meant he kept his job, although as a compromise he had to accept Foley joining GPA in the new position of president—in effect as no. 2.

  Decisive action had saved the day, but Tony had learnt an important lesson: to prosper he needed to operate from now on with more sophistication and subtlety. Never again could he allow an establishment man like Knight to put him in check.

  Chapter 6

  A PINT, A PAPER AND AN ELECTRIC SHOCK

  The seven months between Tony’s resignation and his subsequent withdrawal of that resignation had been a bruising affair, but the effect on his team at GPA was just as profound. The ‘masters of the aviation universe’ atmosphere in the Shannon Free Zone had been replaced with something altogether more circumspect. Uncertainty stalked the corridors of GPA. The staff gossiped about whether Tony was in or whether he was out, who might be replacing him, and what impact it would have on their own prospects. There was something deeper at work as well. Suddenly GPA executives began to see themselves as others saw them—and it prompted a fleeting crisis of confidence.

  In the end, Liam Meade, who had joined GPA in 1977 as director of operations, put this concern directly to Tony. In the summer of 1982 he wrote telling him frankly that ‘a reappraisal of the kind of company we are, and more importantly the kind of company we need to be in the future is essential to the continued well-being of GPA.’ They had generated a strong business from ‘six pulsating years of globe-trotting and driving’. Much of that business had come their way ‘because of the particular aura developed around the new Shannon company with a highly motivated chief executive supported by a hard-working team.’

  But, Meade continued, ‘I submit that in 1982 we are perceived slightly differently.’ Now the company was seen as ‘opportunistic, greedy, slightly parasitic, unyielding’. The market was behaving ‘defensively’ towards GPA, and the company needed ‘to equip itself to overcome this reaction’. That meant a new skill set and image, ‘a different GPA—one that radiates sophistication; professionalism; stability and maturity and that brings valid products to the market at fair price.’ To achieve this ‘transformation’, Meade concluded, ‘will require a commitment to organisation and its development that has been lacking during our initial years.’

  Opportunistic, greedy, parasitic, unyielding; lacking in sophistication, professionalism and maturity—it was a harsh judgement on the first six years of the company that Tony had built from nothing. A year earlier, while Tony was busily planning for Irelandia, it would have been impossible to imagine a member of his staff having the audacity to write such a note. Now the strain of the previous months was visible, not least in the chief executive himself.

  Tony seemed uncharacteristically vulnerable and even fragile. Even such loyalists as Jim King, who formally joined GPA in July 1982 as executive vice-president, noticed that Tony had begun to retreat
into himself. ‘He was cheesed off with the trouble from Aer Lingus,’ King recalls. ‘He drank quite heavily and was incredibly restless—very, very restless.’ It was a characteristic that King would come to regard as ‘maybe depression, because his moods would swing quite a lot.’

  Other staff members at GPA also noticed that Tony had become increasingly withdrawn. He appeared less frequently in Shannon, often working from the ‘bat cave’ office that had been put into the basement at Kilboy. He less and less often took the infamous Monday morning meetings. Inside the GPA offices Maurice Foley, installed as Tony’s no. 2, became the more visible face of day-to-day leadership. ‘Maurice was extremely efficient, hard-working and all those things,’ one executive recalls, but many suspected that the Aer Lingus man was there to keep ‘an eye on all that was going on’. Foley was respected for his organisational capacity, but the staff were unsettled. ‘Different animal, different culture,’ one executive says. ‘From that moment onwards Tony was not as in your face. You would never see him rambling around the corridors. He would always be in his office—in fact he moved into a new office—so he wasn’t accessible.’

  The restlessness that Jim King had noticed was about more than disillusionment with Aer Lingus. Tony had made a success of GPA, making a personal fortune in the process, yet he seemed to be searching for new challenges and opportunities. Irelandia was still rattling around inside his head, but the political and business circumstances were not yet ripe for such a move in Ireland. ‘I think he was frustrated,’ says the architect John Meagher, who had met Tony in 1980 and would become a close friend. ‘He was going into board meetings, going into his office and meetings with banks and aircraft manufacturers. He adored the whole business of aircraft, but he was just bored with pushing paper and money around the table. It’s almost as if he felt nothing real was happening.’

  Tony’s initial impulse to satisfy this desire for a wider role was to look for a public outlet to match his growing interest in the arts. GPA had already emerged as a prominent and imaginative sponsor of the arts in Ireland. In 1980 it had sponsored the influential international art exhibition Rosc in Dublin (a sponsorship that was withdrawn three years later, after ‘the snub’, Tony fumed, of ‘the selection panel [that] did not regard the work of a single Irish artist as being good enough to include in the exhibition’).

  In 1980 Tony had told the board of his strong belief that GPA should ‘find methods of making an appropriate contribution in other ways to the enrichment of the country, including its cultural and artistic development.’ Over the decade this would develop into high-profile sponsorship that included the prestigious GPA Book Award, the GPA International Piano Competition, the GPA Emerging Artists Awards, GPA Music in Great Irish Houses and the Irish Arts Review, as well as many other national and local projects. Tony always insisted that ‘big names’ be attached to these projects, which, for example, saw the likes of Graham Greene and John Updike brought to Ireland to adjudicate on the literary prize. These names brought with them ‘high visual identity with strong media coverage’ for GPA.

  However sophisticated GPA’s arts sponsorship became, in many ways Tony had fallen into it more by way of social bravado than of any grandiose strategy for the company’s role within the artistic world. That same year he had found himself at a dinner hosted by the modernist architect Michael Scott. With eleven people present, thirty-three bottles of wine were drunk. ‘Tony was having a ball of a time,’ remembers John Meagher.

  Michael Scott said to him, ‘Listen, Tony, we’re in serious trouble about Rosc. We need somebody to finance it.’

  So Tony said, ‘How much is it?’

  ‘£55,000.’

  ‘No problem, I’ll do it.’

  So Tony woke up on Sunday realising what he had committed to and had to call his board at 8 a.m. Monday announcing he was spending all this money. There was uproar!

  For the board it was just one more example of Tony ‘going rogue’ and a precursor to the rows that would soon follow about his plans for the new Irelandia airline.

  As it turned out, Rosc was not the only time that Michael Scott would land Tony in hot water. In 1985 Scott sold a death mask of James Joyce to GPA for £16,500. Scott was to have presented the mask at auction, but the private sale to Tony beforehand was hailed as ‘saving’ the fragile plaster cast for Ireland. Stephen Joyce, the author’s controversial grandson, thought otherwise. He protested loudly that such a ‘private and sacred’ artefact should never be sold. Moreover, he suggested, the mask was not even Scott’s to sell. He conceded that Tony had acted honourably in buying the mask. Nevertheless, Joyce wrote to him in the strongest terms urging the return of the mask to the Joyce Museum in Sandycove, Co. Dublin, where it had resided (next-door to Scott’s house) for the previous two decades. If matters were not satisfactorily resolved Joyce would change his own will to exclude all Irish institutions from bequests of the James Joyce items in his possession or over which he had control.

  In the end, Scott backed down, offering to repay Tony and return the mask to Sandycove. ‘What a relief!’ exclaimed the eminent painter Louis le Brocquy. ‘The following day we met Tony Ryan in Kildare Street and he was quite willing to go along with this.’ In fact, the mask remained in Tony’s possession until at least 1991. He didn’t like to be threatened by anyone, least of all a man like Stephen Joyce, whom he despised.

  By the time of the death-mask affair, Tony was already established as an influential cultural figure. He may have started out as an accidental patron of the arts, but by 1982, in despair from his battles with the GPA board, he had sought to develop a role for himself in the artistic life of the country.

  That summer he wrote to the Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, who was also closely associated with Rosc, to propose a new Forum for Business and the Arts. ‘The essential task of the Forum’, he wrote, ‘would be to promote an alliance between business and the arts at the highest level.’ His ambitious programme endeavoured to ‘promote understanding of the role of the arts in our society’, including their ‘commercial value’, to assist companies and institutions ‘in formulating sponsorship policies’, to ‘stimulate the purchase of art objects for corporate collections’ and to encourage the ‘sponsorship of openings and other events’. All this was to take place within a new tax framework that would encourage businesses to support the arts. To start discussion, Tony offered to host a seminar for senior figures in business, politics and the arts.

  ‘All in all, I think your idea of a seminar is a good one,’ Haughey replied. ‘GPA by its enlightened sponsorship of the arts can certainly claim the right to take the initiative in organising it.’

  This first foray by Tony into the politics of the arts marked the beginning of a civic engagement that would last for much of the rest of his life. Although he understood that, for many in the arts world, it was his cash rather than his taste that interested them, the very relationship between money and culture was a topic about which he now began to think deeply.

  ‘Art is not seen as a necessity by the mass of people or their politicians,’ he told a seminar on arts funding in 1984. ‘It is regarded as a luxury—or at best an indulgence.’ While those who loved the arts knew that this was not the case, ‘our persistent mistake is to presume that others always agree.’ The role of business, he continued, was to fill the gap that had been left after the ‘age of religious and aristocratic patronage’. That meant making judgements about quality and popularity. The competition for sponsorship was ‘fierce’. Choices had to be made and ‘uncomfortable issues’ faced. ‘In the province of the arts, no more than in any other field of Irish life,’ Tony observed, giving expression to a broader philosophy, ‘the loud and persistent call is for yet more grants, more subsidies, more neutering security. We are in danger of becoming a politically bought, hand-out society with a growing disapproval of the spirit of self-sufficiency, because it exposes our timidity and laziness.’

  Tony was keen to secure more money for the a
rts; but art itself was ‘a product that has a value and price’. Therefore artists should ‘aspire for commercial success, not shrink from the judgement of the marketplace.’ They should welcome the ‘excitement and satisfaction’ of an environment for artists in which ‘the public would have an informed appreciation’ of their work and be ‘eager to pay for it’. Business could support the arts on that basis. ‘The arts deserve more help from business,’ Tony concluded, but ‘investment in the arts should be in respect of achievement and contribution—not a handout.’

  Over the coming decades Tony would frequently despair at the unwillingness of the artistic community to engage with him in any way other than by putting their collective hand into his wallet. On one notorious occasion in 1994 he invited a select gathering of artists to Kilboy for a symposium with the Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht (and later President of Ireland), Michael D. Higgins, to ‘advise/influence him on the direction of government policy’.

  The event was meant to be a think-in; in the end it became a drink-in. Over the course of the weekend the assembled arts figures laid waste to Tony’s wine cellar, including more than two hundred bottles of his best claret. ‘It is unfortunate that the final session was influenced by the dinner the night before,’ Tony lamented afterwards. ‘I had some points to raise.’

  It was a refrain that Tony would repeat time and again when dealing with the arts world. He believed he had a serious contribution to make through funding and in applying the lessons of business ‘to make radical changes by restructuring the management of the arts in Ireland.’ More often than not this led to exasperation rather than fulfilment, never more so than as a Government appointee on the board of the National Gallery of Ireland.

  In many ways Tony was temperamentally unsuited to sitting as an ordinary board member. The quiet meeting rooms of Merrion Square were unaccustomed to the kind of frank speaking found on a Monday morning in Shannon. What perplexed Tony most was the triviality of what was discussed. ‘I have found the meetings and attitudes most wasteful,’ he complained in 1987 to another board member, Bryan Alton, well known as Éamon de Valera’s doctor. ‘Frankly my most exciting meeting was the last one, when I had the opportunity of smoking a cigar!’