Middle-class Dublin exhaled in relief. Permission had been granted to travel Ryanair. The airline would never be posh, but it had become socially acceptable (and would be explained in ironic, slightly apologetic tones at dinner parties in south Co. Dublin). Now the phones never stopped ringing in the Dublin booking offices as passengers fought to get seats. A year after launching the Luton service Ryanair proudly announced that it had flown its 250,000th passenger. Tony had shown that a new airline could begin to compete with Aer Lingus in Ireland. The next question was whether it would make him any money.
Chapter 8
BETTER TO WEAR AWAY THAN RUST AWAY
By 1986, as Tony Ryan turned fifty, he seemed to have the world at his feet. Ryanair had been successfully launched. GPA, despite the difficult private placement after GECC divested its shares, was about to enter a new period of astonishing global ambition and growth. For Tony this expansion would mean growing international prestige and vast dividends paying him multiple millions each year. Instead of wasting that money in areas where he had no expertise, as with the Sunday Tribune, he was now investing in an industry in which he had well-honed instincts and expert knowledge.
Ryanair in the beginning would cost him millions more than he lost on the Tribune, but Tony always believed that the low-cost, no-frills model would see the airline come right in the end. More to the point, Ryanair, unlike GPA, was a company that Tony could call his own. He was beholden to no-one. There was no majority shareholder to lord it over him or clip his wings. The entire project, despite being seen by many as a plaything, was all of a piece with the way that Tony had come to think of himself.
By the mid-1980s Tony looked the very model of a modern entrepreneur. Friends and colleagues had already noticed the change in his sartorial taste: cream suits, Italian shoes and distinctive pastel-coloured shirts with white collars. But nothing seemed to announce his change in status and attitude more than the arrival in 1985 of a personal driver. In many places in the booming mid-1980s, not least London and New York, a driver was often the first thing anyone with money looked to acquire. But Ireland was not booming, and in a society that often frowned on those who got above themselves—‘Who does that fella think he is?’—such a status symbol inevitably sent out a message.
‘Tony became more and more removed from the minions of the place,’ says one of the earliest GPA recruits. ‘You would meet him socially from time to time, but not with the regularity that you had in the early days. You didn’t know from then onwards whether he was travelling or in Kilboy or what he was doing.’ The hiring of a driver suggested to many, including his colleagues in GPA, the general sense of Tony’s withdrawal behind the walls of Kilboy and the forbidding doors of the Mercedes-Benz.
Tony Ryan was no longer one of the boys. He was rich. He was the boss. He was in charge. Ireland’s leading universities even gave him a new honour to play with—‘Dr Tony Ryan’—which prompted sneers from many. But for the boy from Limerick Junction who had never been to university these awards showed respect (‘For robing purposes, my height is 5'9" and cap size 7½,’ he advised Trinity College, Dublin, in 1987). University had not been an option for young Tony Ryan. Instead, these famous Irish institutions were now coming to him.
Behind the walls and honours, life for Tony went on, all observed by the man he had employed in the new position of driver. If no man is a hero to his valet, Tony Ryan was the exception to the rule. Certainly that was the case with Derek Doyle, who was taken on as driver and general Man Friday in 1985. ‘I saw all sides of him,’ Doyle says. ‘He was an extremely fair man, although he had a short fuse on the little things. But on the big things very often he was extremely sanguine and just said, “That’s life, so”.’ Doyle worked for Tony for more than twenty years until the latter’s death in 2007.
He would tire you out all right. You could be doing weeks on end of morning, noon and night—starting at 6 a.m. and still out at two the next morning—so it would be tough going. But he would always sense if I was getting frazzled and would come into the kitchen in good humour, saying, ‘Derek, it’s going to be quiet tomorrow. Why don’t you take it off.’ So he would push you to breaking-point, but could be good too.
More than most, Doyle got to see the tastes of the private man away from the spotlight. Whereas formal dinners at Kilboy would be characterised by fine food and expensive wines, Tony’s habits at home were much plainer. He still loved his fry every Sunday morning. Dinners at home were of the kind that his mother might have made back at 83 Railway Cottage, and he enjoyed nothing more than his favourite cabbage and bacon. There were concerns about middle-aged spread, with frequent bans on puddings in order to help keep his weight down. That didn’t stop Tony appearing regularly in the kitchen when he could smell sausages or bacon under the grill.
In contrast to the man at GPA who let everyone know where they stood, Tony often seems to have tried hard not to trouble or upset his private staff. Each morning, for example, Doyle would include grapes in Tony’s bowl of fruit at breakfast. Finally, one day Tony rang down and said, ‘Derek, I don’t like grapes.’ Uncharacteristically it had taken him two years to say so. ‘I was one of the few people, actually, that he didn’t bollock,’ recalls Doyle, who nevertheless witnessed some of the terrible tongue-lashings dished out to others. Over the years, he came to realise that Tony instinctively took to or against people for whatever reason, and that there wasn’t much changing his mind. ‘You either got on with him or you didn’t,’ he suggests. ‘There was no grey area. If he liked you, then you were fine. If he didn’t, then it didn’t matter what you did, how good you were—it was curtains.’
Doyle also became an important character in the lives of GPA and Ryanair operatives when it came to gauging the mood of the boss. At GPA House in Shannon people would keep an eye out for the Merc parked outside to know if Tony was around the building. ‘If you really wanted to get Tony’s ear’, says one, ‘you checked with Derek, because he knew what was happening, where Tony was going and what time his flight might be.’
Tony was often at his happiest away from Shannon. More and more he seemed to welcome and embrace the rhythms of life in the countryside. Photographs from the mid-eighties show a completely different side of his personality when down at Kilboy: relaxed, informal and visibly happy. In the fields with his cattle, dressed in a shabby sheepskin coat and muck boots, hair awry and stick in hand, he inevitably looks a long way from the image he cultivated in business. But neither does he look like a millionaire playing at ‘country squire’. Tony simply looks at one with himself and his surroundings.
Arthur Finan, the farm manager who arrived at Kilboy shortly after Doyle, remembers that Tony liked nothing more than wandering the estate to see what was going on. ‘You would have these guys working away on the farm, cutting timber with a chainsaw, their trousers half way round their backsides,’ he remembers, ‘and Dr Ryan would come up on them and tap them on the shoulder and say, “How’s that going?” and chat. He thought the world of them.’ He deferred to them when it came to estate matters, even when they came into conflict with other areas of Tony’s business dealings.
Finan recalls one day at market in Ennis selling cattle from Kilboy and getting a call from Tony saying he had looked at the figures with his PA and didn’t think the selling price was high enough. ‘Bring them home,’ Tony told him. Finan was rankled by the unprofessionalism and by having his judgement called into question. ‘I can’t come back,’ he explained, ‘I’m in the middle of selling your cattle, and I’m about to go into the ring.’ Down the line, Finan recalls, he heard the PA launch into an attack, ‘which really upset me’.
When Finan got back to Kilboy he went to see Tony with his letter of resignation. ‘Arthur, if you leave,’ Tony told him, ‘then I’m going to sell this farm.’ It was an exaggeration, of course, but for the next twenty years Finan heard no more about the farm figures versus proposed figures drawn up by an accountant. ‘One animal won’t make the same as the
next,’ Finan explained to Tony. ‘They might all be white Charolais cattle, but they don’t all make the same money.’ Tony accepted that, and the matter was never raised again. The PA, thwarted in his agricultural ambitions, instead ended up maximising Tony’s investment in Ryanair. His name was Michael O’Leary.
As well as these simple pleasures of rural life, Tony also developed the more traditional pursuits of the country gentleman. About this time he became friends with Ken Rohan, one of the best-known property developers in the country. The two men began shooting together regularly at the Ballinacor estate, near Rathdrum, after which Tony would stay at Rohan’s beautiful Charleville estate, in Enniskerry. ‘No more than me, Tony wasn’t one of the great shots of Ireland,’ Rohan recalls, ‘but we enjoyed the thrill of it and the social aspect.’ Again it was a side of him that many didn’t see. ‘Besides being an incredible entrepreneur,’ he says, ‘Tony loved his fun and had a lovely, mischievous sense of humour. We enjoyed shooting each other’s birds instead of our own, which was even more fun.’
It was about this time that Tony began to take his lifelong interest in horses more seriously. He had been drawn to the ‘sport of kings’ since boyhood, when he would stand on the roof of the family cottage to watch racing at Limerick Junction. In 1986 he had only one mare, Kilboy Concorde, at the farm. When she had a foal Tony had asked Jim Bolger, the famous trainer he knew through Maurice Foley, to take a look. That horse, Father Phil—named after Father Philip Fogarty, the boys’ headmaster at Clongowes—won several races before breaking its leg and being put down. Then another colt, Monsignor Phil, started winning races. So as the mare kept producing, buyers started arriving. Tony bought a second mare, Diamond Fields, for £270,000. Her first foal made 375,000 guineas at Newmarket and herself went on to produce a number of winners. ‘He was incredibly lucky with horses,’ reflects Finan, who often thought that equine success gave Tony more pleasure than any million-dollar business deals.
It was enjoyment that would later see Tony purchase the Castleton horse farm in Lexington, Kentucky, at the centre of the thoroughbred horse world. There he would lavish time and money on breeding stock, with notable successes including Catchascatchcan, whose first foal, the drily named Antonius Pius, fetched €1½ million as the farm’s first yearling through the sales ring. ‘He made a big impact in the thoroughbred world in a short space of time,’ says Julian Dollar, who worked for Tony before moving to the famous Newsells Park Stud. ‘He would never have called himself a fantastic horseman, but he was able to make very astute business decisions. He was an amazing character.’
Time in the pasture with the cattle in Kilboy, shooting weekends, the horses and the acquisition of a driver—it would be easy to imagine that Tony was slowing down. He even bought a house in Ibiza, to which he repaired each June for sunshine and relaxation. And while it was easy to point to evidence to the contrary, not least Ryanair, as proof that his restless energy and ambition remained unabated, there was no question that Tony was consciously adjusting the balance of his life.
To some degree this was simply the enjoyment of the considerable fruits of his equally considerable labours. But it also addressed a deeper fear. His own father, Martin, had died at only fifty-four, just a few years older than Tony himself now was. Tony always believed that Martin, worn down by the demands of life on the railways, had essentially worked himself to death. Tony may have had more in the way of creature comforts than Martin, but the millions of miles he had travelled and the constant stress of running businesses in the high-pressured world of international aviation would, he feared, eventually take their toll.
At various times Tony seriously considered complete withdrawal. ‘He talked about that a number of times,’ recalls David Kennedy. ‘He spoke to me about the fact that his father had died quite young. His father had died in his fifties of a heart attack, and Tony was quite conscious of this.’
In the end the acquisition of a driver, together with more time spent at Kilboy, became the concession to age, but Tony’s father remained very much on his mind from now on. In 1990, at precisely the same age at which his father had passed away, Tony watched his mother turn the sod for the Martin Ryan Institute at University College, Galway—a tribute from a grateful son. Above the door would be placed the lesson that Martin had taught Tony as a boy and by which he continued to live his life: ‘It is better to wear away than rust away.’
At a time when Tony was thinking about his relationship with his father, his own role as a father was giving him particular satisfaction. He had seen less of the boys growing up than he would have wanted. Now Tony felt he was doing something to help and encourage the two older boys, Cathal and Declan, in a way that had not been possible when they were younger. He was pleased to be giving them a platform in the business world through Ryanair. More importantly, he was thrilled to be working alongside them and, best of all, to be spending time together regularly.
Cathal and Declan were very different in personality, but each reflected a side of their father that Tony himself could now relate to. The wilder, more combustible Cathal reminded Tony of his younger self. Declan, more thoughtful and reflective, connected with the man that Tony had become. He was proud of both and now began a new kind of relationship with them as men, not boys, and it was one that would give him pleasure for the rest of his life.
Meanwhile, with Shane, his youngest boy, who was still at school, Tony now had more free time than when the two older sons had been growing up. In particular, father and son developed their relationship around a shared love of racing, which would later see Shane become a successful international horse-breeder at Tony’s farm in Kentucky.
Navigating the difficulties of the split between Tony and Mairéad had been difficult for everyone concerned. The two separated but never divorced. Nevertheless, by the mid-1980s Tony had managed to move on in his personal life. In particular he developed an intense relationship with Miranda Guinness, Countess of Iveagh, that lasted close to seven years. It could never have been a low-key affair. Tony was by now one of Ireland’s most prominent millionaires. Miranda was among the most prominent society figures in Ireland, and her comings and goings lit up the society pages. Irish Tatler even named its society page, ‘Miranda’s Diary’, in her honour. She was married to Benjamin Guinness, third Earl of Iveagh, until their marriage collapsed in 1984 under the pressure of his battle with alcoholism.
‘She was the perfect clothes horse,’ says Lucinda O’Sullivan in The Little Black Book. ‘Tall, slim, beautiful with dark auburn hair, twinkling eyes, and a wonderful soft, plummy voice.’ Everyone who met Miranda seemed to fall in love with her, and Tony was no exception. ‘He was very much in love with her,’ says Denis O’Brien, who was Tony’s PA in the early 1980s. Even when the relationship eventually floundered, about 1991, the two remained close friends. No-one would ever hear Tony speak a bad word about Miranda. ‘The fondness was still there,’ says Ken Rohan. ‘He didn’t move on and forget.’
As well as bringing a new dimension to Tony’s emotional life, Miranda was also an important influence on his style and tastes. ‘She polished him,’ O’Brien says. ‘It was like polishing a diamond, because he always had the interest, but she developed his taste.’ To some degree this was social. Wealth had brought many things into Tony’s life, but Miranda represented the kind of ‘old money’ that no amount of dividends could bring a working-class lad from Limerick Junction. She smoothed his way in fashionable and artistic society, often saving the day.
Seán Donlon of GPA saw this first hand during the visit of Graham Greene to judge the first GPA Book Award. Greene, frail and ill by this time, found the public outings extremely stressful. ‘Miranda really rescued [events] in Dublin when things got rough,’ says Donlon. ‘Greene couldn’t cope with big crowds, so she brought him out of buildings and sat him down and got him a glass of whisky. He didn’t particularly click with Tony, but he certainly clicked with Miranda, who really minded him for the few days.’
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bsp; Tony never learnt to enjoy Miranda’s social set, and in photographs, stuffed into ‘black tie’, he rarely looks happy or comfortable. However, what really did give him pleasure was the way Miranda seriously entertained his aspirations as a collector of art and restorer of property. Miranda had already transformed the Guinnesses’ sepulchral Farmleigh estate in the Phoenix Park to renewed Georgian splendour. Later, to critical acclaim, she would restore the dilapidated Palladian mansion at Wilbury Park in Wiltshire. Miranda enhanced Tony’s understanding of the decorative arts, helping him to think about the lines of a room and judge the weights of silks and fabrics, the scale of furnishings and the quality of paintings that would be hung. Although Tony continued to support contemporary artists, it was from this time onwards that his tastes moved back in time as a serious collector of Stuart and Georgian art.
‘Miranda had an incredible sense of aesthetics, as she showed with her own house in England,’ Rohan says, ‘and Tony was very good at asking for advice.’ It was Miranda, says Ann Reihill, publisher of the GPA-sponsored Irish Arts Review, who ‘taught Tony about the finer points.’ Almost as a practice piece, he bought an elegant white stucco Georgian house in Pelham Place in London’s fashionable South Kensington, which he and Miranda redesigned together.
Working on Pelham Place with Miranda served as Tony’s apprenticeship for his later and most important project: the stunning restoration of Lyons Demesne in Co. Kildare. The pleasure that Tony got from this new departure was great, and, according to his friend Jim King, he threw himself into it. ‘Once he opened up to the visual arts he became really very, very knowledgeable. So Miranda had a huge influence on his life and development.’
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